Starrunner
by orpheus-under-starlight
Summary: In what would have been the year 17 BBY, Supreme Chancellor Sheev Palpatine is found slumped over his desk, dead to rights and emitting a foul odor. The coroners declare the body victim to a heart attack and the smell a result of a lack of a timely embalming. Nobody in the galaxy is fooled by this.
1. Chapter 1

**Starrunner**

In what would have been the year 17 BBY, Supreme Chancellor Sheev Palpatine is found slumped over his desk, dead to rights and emitting a foul odor. The coroners declare the body victim to a heart attack and the smell a result of a lack of a timely embalming—a bit of bowels humor, the head coroner says with a nervous laugh when interviewed by the _Galactic Enquirer._

Nobody in the galaxy is fooled by this.

Obi-Wan Kenobi, recovering in the Temple from a field injury after the most outrageous stunt by the Skywalker-Kenobi team yet, does Mace Windu a personal favor: he takes up the investigation that the Senate is pushing for the Jedi to conduct. Accompanying him as a result of Anakin's continued failure to get the Temple bureaucrats to give him some leave already is a Masterless Padawan named Lana Ruhr, twenty standard years of age, whose strange visions from the Unifying Force are recorded personally by Master Yoda and who may be the only person in the galaxy capable of actually _seeing_ what happened to Palpatine.

In the meanwhile, the rest of the galaxy is going to kark. There's still a civil war raging, after all.

* * *

"In the dream, Masters, I heard these words: _There will be a reckoning._ After that, I woke up. _"_

Lana Ruhr dips her head, and her Padawan braid, long and storied, bobs with it. It is far longer than her Padawan haircut—a standard she had adopted by choice despite the allowances made for senior Padawans nearing their preparation for the Trials. The length of the braid, Obi-Wan Kenobi thinks as he watches with the serenity expected in all Council sessions, is the only thing that demarcates her as being different from any other Jedi. One must look twice at Lana Ruhr to think anything other than _Jedi—move along._

It is precisely that presentation of normalcy that is so curious. _I will admit to being a stickler for order and orthodoxy,_ Obi-Wan thinks with not a little irony, observing the picture-perfect show of respect and its corresponding feeling in the Force. _But rare is the Padawan that takes so seriously the admonishment that a Jedi must have no self._

He's done his research, besides. There is far more to the young woman than she is letting on to the Council—there'd have to be for her to be assigned by Mace and Master Yoda to work with him on the Senate's latest, most odious request, but aside from that, there's the fact that even outside the Order, it's uncommon to find anyone so steeped in the Unifying Force.

Yes, he _has_ noticed Yoda's purposefully unsubtle glances in his direction, thank you very much.

"Thank you for your account, Padawan Ruhr," Mace says, nodding at her. "You are dismissed."

Lana hesitates for the barest of moments. "Thank _you_ , Masters," she says, the only breach in decorum, but it is accompanied by a precise, forty-five-degree bow—on Ja'ru, it would be about five degrees short of an overt insult, but in fine Coruscanti liberal tradition, Lana is signaling that she is willing to cooperate further. A very deliberate choice, if rather unneeded. Nobody in the room misses it. She leaves without further comment, braid bobbing all the way.

It occurs to Obi-Wan that Anakin only ever either looks others in the eye or (if they are authoritarian figures) will not meet their gaze at all—and that he often expresses his distaste for the cloistered nature of the Council chambers. More frequently when Obi-Wan is on-planet to attend sessions. Come to think of it, he'd only really started voicing that when Obi-Wan had been given the rank of Master—

"See now, you do," Yoda says, watching him with ancient, amused eyes; briefly Obi-Wan feels abashed, a stubborn youngling once more, searching for a rock in the gardens well past firstlesson. Mercifully, Yoda lets the distraction pass. "Suffered much, Padawan Ruhr has. Brought her close to the Force, it did."

Mace nods, fingers steepled. "We have on record that her crechemaster frequently observed her experience nightmares; she was tested for any potential illnesses at age seven, when she reported a recurring experience akin to sleep paralysis, and among other things, the healers noted her strong affinity for the Unifying Force. Not unlike yourself, Obi-Wan. The trouble is that when Knight Keera was reunited with the Force, Padawan Ruhr's nightmares became nightly, specific occurrences like the one she related to us, rather than the sporadic, vague images we are more used to dealing with."

"Believe that her visions are related to the matter of the Chancellor's death, I do," Yoda says quietly. The Force rings with the words, a resounding _truth_ echoing in all their ears, and Obi-Wan, familiar as he is with visions, blinks. That kind of positive feedback is—unusual. Mace looks a tad disconcerted—he sees shatterpoints, true, but the man works on facts and verifiable evidence. Not a bad thing to have when running the logistics of a war, really.

"Well, then," Obi-Wan says, sighing. _Why do I sense we've taken on another pathetic life-form, Master?_ "I suppose I shall arrange a time to meet with her and hammer out the details of our assignment."

They will be going into the den of vipers that is the Senate, after all, and it's his duty as a Jedi to ensure that his comrades are prepared.

"Obi-Wan," Mace says, drawing his attention. Gratitude is reflected in both Mace's tired eyes and his Force signature, and Obi-Wan does not wonder when Mace's brows lined themselves with worry and foreboding. The war has changed them all, even Yoda, and its demands have forced the Order to bend in ways that it would not have dreamed of two decades ago, not even for Qui-Gon, one of its most beloved mavericks. Mace dips his head lightly, and the gesture means far more than the casual observer would ever know. "Thank you."

He never did have patience for politicians, and the war dragging itself on has stretched what little tolerance existed very thin. He would have been very hard-pressed to both conduct the investigation into the Chancellor's death and to run the war, all the while deeply troubled by the compromises they've all been forced to make, and the Force knows it. Obi-Wan stands and draws his cloak about himself as he bows. He ignores the threads of fate spiraling into infinity before his eyes, weaving and re-weaving themselves, breaking and snapping in places that had always been tightly-woven and immutable. For the moment. "May the Force be with you, Mace, Master Yoda."

"And with you also," Yoda says, his presence brushing against Obi-Wan's in the Force like a hand over his forehead; it is a wordless and ancient benediction, one he teaches every youngling the significance of.

 _Follow the Force's leading and trust its guidance. It is your closest friend, and it will never fail you._

Even Jedi have sentiment, though to outsiders it seems a strange and foreign thing. Touched by Yoda's concern, Obi-Wan bows once more and departs the Council chambers, determinedly _not_ leaning on his right foot to take the weight off the left.

The doors shut. Mace sighs, looking wearily at Yoda.

"Shifting, the Force is," Yoda tells his former Padawan, keeping the amusement at Obi-Wan's stubbornness out of his voice. "At the center of it, Obi-Wan Kenobi is."

"As ever. Sometimes I wonder if _he_ wasn't our Chosen One," Mace mutters, finally retrieving his datapad from the compartment in his seat. "Not even Skywalker gets himself entangled in as many things as Kenobi has. Then again, they get into things together, these days…"

Yoda snorts and does not share what the Force has led him to see: Obi-Wan Kenobi is only a man, but he is the _Force's_ man. If he is not among its most beloved sacrifices, Yoda will eat his own gimer stick.

* * *

"My apologies for the unconventional location, but I'm a little held up," comes Obi-Wan Kenobi's cultured, carefully neutral voice, accompanied by a baby's happy screech. Lana stares at her comlink. It blinks unassumingly in the midday light, the green dot flashing in a thoroughly distracting fashion. Where has she seen a green light like that before…? "I requested that one of the Temple pilots bring you here—if you could head down to the hangar bay at your earliest convenience, Padawan Ruhr?"

She's talking to him—Obi-Wan Kenobi. The Negotiator, among other things. It's… strange. Lana shrugs, realizes he has no way of seeing it, and speaks. "Of course, Master Kenobi. I'll depart before 1300 hours. May the Force be with you," she adds, hearing another baby—undoubtedly a Skywalker twin—give a wordless yell of unfettered joy in the background. She feels it in the Force and wishes she could be surprised in the least.

She's not. Knight Skywalker's children send periodic blasts of infantile feeling and excitement washing over Coruscant periodically, and no amount of shielding can really block their prodigious talent for projection out. Other Jedi might be annoyed by it, but the fact that they're alive is a miracle of the Force, and Lana can't really complain.

"My thanks. I'll need it," Obi-Wan mutters, a touch of warm sarcasm she _probably_ wasn't supposed to hear lacing his words. "No, Luke, don't touch your mother's tea set—"

The line goes dead. Carefully, Lana exhales. She will not laugh. She is a Jedi. Jedi practice serenity at all times.

She puts her head in her hands and laughs, a tinge of hysteria leaking into the sound of it. Lana Ruhr, ostensibly twenty standard years of age, an average Padawan with a dead Master, is investigating the probable murder-confirmed death of the Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic alongside _Obi-Wan Kenobi._

No big deal, really. She'd only gone and modeled her professional demeanor on his example. He's only the reason that the Healers even considered the idea that she wasn't, in fact, mentally ill when she'd notified them about the unusual depth of her visions—he was the only thing that prevented her from being a Cassandra, from being a teller of prophecies that nobody believed. He's only—

Only a man.

A very important man.

But just a man. A Jedi. An older and respected coworker.

Yes. Nothing to get worked up over. No different from working alongside, oh, say, Knight Lucian, or perhaps Master Mar-Suu. And she _will not_ panic, as panic is unbecoming of a Jedi.

Especially when _Sheev Palpatine is dead._ She's scoured the news reports five, six, seven times, and she still can't really believe it.

"Well, Master," she says to her empty apartment when she's done, curling her hands in a robe she knows is too large for her. It's useful to conceal her size, anyways. When the motion fails to bring her the concentration required to reach for the Force, she curls a hand around her braid and tugs gently. It's enough, and she lets out a shaky breath as she opens herself to its quiet eddies, bit by bit. "I suppose my visions really did have the purpose you always believed they did."

She imagines Risse Keera's amused mien, purple lips pulled back in a way that had always inadvertently displayed her too-sharp teeth to any who happened to observe her. It centers her a little more, and she breathes out again, just to make sure. When she is calm, and no migraine seems oncoming, Lana stands and waves the blinds shut. She'll have to make sure she has all her things—it's been years since she left the Temple, even just to see the planet itself. There's been too much to do inside.

Lana sighs and slips her personal datapad into a nondescript cloth carrier bag.

Now the Force has seen fit to guide her into the orbit of those who have walked more difficult and visible paths, and she'd like to be prepared to fulfill whatever task it has for her in that.

* * *

Safely ensconced in one of the many Temple taxicabs after having narrowly dodged Master Che and a group of Master Nu's Archivist junkies, Lana breathes out and hopes the pilot doesn't hear it. Not hard—she's already focused on the deranged free-for-all that is Coruscant's major airways.

"This is worse than it was when I was around," remarks the man next to her, leaning back in his seat with his arms crossed over his chest, and Lana is distinctly reminded of Master Windu's habit of holding himself like a statue. The difference: Qui-Gon Jinn has what one might consider the opposite of bald—luxurious, flowing, _long_ hair—and he is also glowing blue, of all things. She's relatively certain that Master Windu doesn't do that, but she's been wrong before. Notably about which Archivists Master Nu favored… "Goodness, what _is_ that being doing?"

 _It looks like an attempt to do a wheelbarrow corkscrew maneuver into the next lane to avoid that angry Rodian, Master Jinn,_ Lana thinks, long since resigned to the tyranny of ghosts over her personal time.

"My. They have names for that?"

Lana half-smiles. She adjusts her bag so it rests in her lap, glad for the continued presence of her datapad in its holder. _Knight Skywalker convinced Master Muln to teach the younglings as if it were so, Master Jinn._

"I see." If Qui-Gon looks pleased at this, well, nobody really has the right to tell a dead man what he ought to be amused by, now do they?

 _What brings you here, Master Jinn?_ she asks after a moment. She has never before been visited by Qui-Gon Jinn, though she has certainly _seen_ the man about the Temple, most often attending to the various plants scattered about the upper levels and watching the Kenobi-Skywalker team in the Healers' Wing. He does nothing without purpose—even if that purpose isn't apparent.

That she knows this from other sources means little. Past, present, and future: all of these things are nebulous, and she has long since stopped worrying over where she gets her information from. Only how to explain it to others who wouldn't understand, and the ghosts have always known her. Qui-Gon smiles at her, austere in his warmth _._ Funny how some people are more touchable in death. "Merely paying a long-awaited visit."

He says nothing else, and she needs nothing else. Lana nods. It's a mercy of the Force, she thinks, that she's never personally spoken to Obi-Wan Kenobi before this assignment.

It's a mercy of the Force, she thinks, that Qui-Gon is wise enough to attempt it while Obi-Wan has Skycrawlers underfoot.

* * *

"Master Kenobi," Lana says with a hasty bow, quickly moving into the interior of Padme's apartment with just the right amount of polite observation and taking up a position by the wall. He quirks a brow at her choice of the corner next to the kitchen, but he doesn't have time to wrangle a giggling Luke back into his grip _and_ pay further attention to her when he hears a voice from the doorway.

"Padawan," says Qui-Gon Jinn, a blue glow in the afternoon light. The door slides shut behind him.

 _What,_ Obi-Wan's mind says flatly.

Lana coughs, having somehow shimmied her way into the kitchen in the space between… _that_ and Luke perching on Obi-Wan's shoulders, eyeing Qui-Gon curiously. "If you have need of me, Master Kenobi, I'll… be in here. I hear one of the children."

"Her name is Leia," Obi-Wan says absently, still staring at his errant Master. "She will most likely be attempting to open the fridge."

"Noted," Lana calls back, and the kitchen door shuts behind her.

Qui-Gon strides over to Obi-Wan, nearly reaching for the space where his Padawan braid used to be before remembering himself. Instead, he crosses his arms over his chest and looks at Luke with a small, impossibly fond smile. "I sense you've picked up another pathetic lifeform, Padawan mine."

"Master," Obi-Wan manages, horrified.

* * *

"Hello, Princess," Lana says, abandoning Jedi decorum to slide down and sit crosslegged on the kitchen tile. She's going to be in here a while, what with Obi-Wan's brief moment of utter incomprehension in the other room. Leia, all of two years old and already sporting dark curls and darker eyes framed by what can only be the Senator's lashes, looks at her from the top of the refrigerator. Lana shrugs. "I'm a Jedi apprentice. Master Kenobi is… experiencing a revelation, at the moment."

Leia digests this. "Oh-bi?" she asks, tilting her head. She shifts, shirt and trousers twisting impossibly to aid her in achieving her new position; to Lana's quiet amazement, she manages to drape herself over the fridge's edge while balancing on her belly. _Kids._

"Yes. You can sense his visitor in the Force, can't you? Big, strong, tall, warm?"

Leia nods. "Oh-bi-wa-un."

Stated as incontrovertible fact. Leia is unconsciously projecting happiness at the thought, and self-satisfaction at being _right._

"Not quite, Princess," Lana tells her, amused. _Princess_ is a fitting appellation for the authority with which Leia speaks, luckily. "Close enough, though."

Leia frowns at that, but it isn't enough of an offense for her to stop fiddling with the lock on the fridge that has Knight Skywalker's signature all over it. Babyproofing with the Force—how did he even think to do that?

"Oh-bi?" Leia asks again, after some time has passed.

Lana blinks, having been determinedly ignoring the… disquiet… emanating from the Force in the other room. It's so many levels of _not her fight_ that she's not going to touch it with a ten-foot pole. No, that's a job for… Knight Skywalker, probably. (Kark. She _wants_ to, though. The man hasn't been planetside for longer than a day or three in two years.) "I'm not sure what you're asking. He's in the other room, and your brother is with him…"

"Out," Leia says, abandoning the lock and sitting up. Apparently, this is more important.

"What does the Force say?" Lana asks instead of immediate acquiescence. She raises a brow when Leia pouts. "I know you can understand me. Think of it as practice. You're strong, but even the strongest have to develop control."

Leia's eyes narrow in concentration; Lana focuses herself on the unseen and quietly watches Leia's clumsy grasp for Obi-Wan's presence in the Force. A child's mind is a marvelous thing, and Leia, like Luke, broadcasts Light—even though Obi-Wan's shields are a bastion of neutrality, he jolts in surprise and discomfort leaks through. Leia seems to be trying to send him a semblance of calm, though her happiness at trying and succeeding at something new betrays her.

"Leia?" Obi-Wan's voice comes from the other room after a distinct pause.

"Oh-bi," she calls back, clambering down the fridge with what Lana is certain is Force-provided grace.

With nothing really in the way of direction, Lana follows her into the living room; Qui-Gon is gone, and Luke has attached himself to Obi-Wan's side and is amusing himself by playing with the chrono on Obi-Wan's wrist. Leia barrels into Obi-Wan's knees and grins in triumph when he sighs and picks her up, gently depositing her on his other side; she coos, a fuzzy image of Knight Skywalker floating in the Force between her and a grinning Luke. _Safety._

Impossibly, something far-off and distant pulses with warmth in response.

"Master Kenobi," Lana says with a bow instead of addressing the several gundarks present in the metaphorical room. Or the brace on his leg. Particularly not that, actually. She has the vaguest of suspicions that she's not half as much a _partner_ as she is a _minder_ in the eyes of the Council _,_ in terms of Obi-Wan's health. "It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance."

"It's a pleasure to make yours as well, Padawan Ruhr. I've heard quite a bit about you," Obi-Wan says smoothly, like he isn't sandwiched between two younglings determined to make his limbs their personal playground. There's a polite smile on his face—warmer than it'd be for an outsider, cooler than it'd be for a friend.

A test. Jedi endure many. Lana sighs, realizing she isn't as anonymous as she'd always wanted to be. "I suppose it is unusual to remain Temple-bound as a Padawan in these times, Master."

"We must do as the Force wills us—but I was speaking more of Feemor. You _are_ his grandpadawan, after all." That smile is charming. Alarmingly so.

 _Yes,_ Lana is tempted to say, out of a lack of knowledge on what to do next. _The Coruscanti sky is blue, too._ "Pardon my asking, but have you heard from him recently, Master?"

"I'm afraid nothing has changed since his last report. Ilum remains frozen, I believe, and behind Separatist space. I haven't spoken _personally_ with him in years—circumstances never seem to allow for it." Obi-Wan gestures to the chair across from the couch. "Please, take a seat. I suspect we may be here for some time."

Lana sits, arranging herself properly as best she can in the cushy seat. A man like Master Kenobi is not one to default on formalities, and she _is_ in Senator Amidala's home—Senator Amidala, who vouches for the Jedi in the Senate despite being viewed with suspicion on both sides of _that_ particular dispute. Lana quite likes the woman, and politeness is hardly rude. The datapad jostles against her, and as Obi-Wan starts talking, she quietly wonders if bringing it was superfluous.

* * *

"Senator Amidala," says a young blonde woman in Jedi robes with a Padawan braid, bowing. "Your home is lovely. Thank you for all you do."

Padme blinks. "No, thank _you,_ Padawan," she says automatically, earning her a small but unerringly genuine smile; Lana nods and departs, her small frame quickly disappearing into the turbolift.

" _That's Jedi Padawan Lana Ruhr,"_ says Sabe over Padme's comm, sounding far too amused. _"Master Kenobi's partner for his latest mission. He had her come here for the briefing, since he didn't want to leave your children unattended."_

"I don't think I've ever had a Jedi compliment my _home_ before," Padme muses, making her way into the apartment. Thinking on Obi-Wan's decidedly protective attitude toward Luke and Leia is unproductive, no matter how funny; Ani came home with bruises when he last tried to compare his Master to a mother krayt dragon. _You've got the call down pat,_ he'd said as Luke clutched Obi-Wan's arm adoringly, and Obi-Wan had just given Anakin a witheringly disappointed look, like there was nothing he could've possibly done worse than _that._ The effect was somewhat mitigated by Luke's happy coos.

Anakin had _laughed._ That, more than anything else, was what provoked the challenge to a duel.

She's always wondered about those two.

Sabe snorts. _"They're Jedi,"_ is all she says, and Padme realizes she must've voiced that out loud. _"Signing off, Senator."_

"Call me Padme," she reminds Sabe, but to no avail. Sabe has already ended the call.

Padme rolls her eyes.

"Mama!" come two beloved voices, and Padme grins as her children— _her children—_ rush into the living room from the direction of the kitchen, barreling into her legs and speaking quickly in their toddler babble. Padme drops to her knees and gathers them into her arms, kissing Luke and Leia's foreheads in turn, and when she takes a breath their scents feel like _home._

She is so, so glad to be alive right now.

"Welcome back," Obi-Wan says, standing in the kitchen doorway, a small, uncertain smile on his face. "They've been waiting."

Padme spares him a smile, too. "Thank you for looking after them, Obi-Wan."

"Oh, it was nothing," he demurs, moving back into the kitchen to finish up whatever he and the twins were doing in there.

Always the Jedi. Satine, Padme reflects, has her work cut out for her.


	2. Chapter 2

They have three key items on their docket: the Chancellor's office, his apartment in the 500 Republica building, and his pod in the Senate rotunda. After that? An examination of the physical evidence collected by the Coruscanti chief police department and the Senate guards, as well as the reports on the various effects strange items in the Chancellor's office had on preliminary investigations. Because, Lana reflects, there's nothing that quite says _kriff you_ like a bust of your own head that propels people away from the tapestry behind it.

Master Kenobi—Obi-Wan—glances at her, amused, and Lana tries to smile through her embarrassment. Right. Shields. She's used to mostly being around the various nonhuman denizens of the fifteenth floor, all Knights or Masters, who don't give a flying kark about her whimsicality or her way of communing with the Force, so long as it doesn't keep them up during their sleep cycles.

 _Stars,_ she hasn't taken enough out-of-Temple missions. Hard to believe all that time has really passed in the Archives—hard to believe that the light cycle still exists the same way, but then, it's hard to ignore light levels in the Temple, either.

"It's a nice day, isn't it, Master Kenobi?" Lana asks, summoning her Jedi calm. There is one, no, there are _two_ things she is absolutely certain of in this moment: the Force is with her, and she has absolutely no idea what she's doing. "Smells like repulsorlift exhaust and sublight drifters. The quintessential essence of Coruscant."

"Oh, yes, naturally," Obi-Wan says, because what else do you say to that, really?

Lana shifts. Her secondary datapad, tiny and old, fitted with a cantankerous AI, chugging on stubbornly despite all the projections of the Temple technicians, buzzes in protest. She ignores it. The outer tunic muffles it, anyway. "Speaking of sublight drifters—did the Chancellor have his own personal ship?"

Obi-Wan raises an eyebrow. "It's very probable—we may certainly check. Any particular reason why?"

"Might've possibly had a vision, maybe, and Master Yoda told me to investigate the one I told the Council about. Can't be sure unless it's a heavily modified Lambda-class T-4a shuttle with an invisishield and tint-on-command transparisteel windows."

"Aren't those still in the design phase? Under discreet supervision?"

"How'd you know that?"

"Knight Skywalker keeps up with starship theory in his free time." Obi-Wan tucks his arms into his voluminous sleeves. "How did _you_ know that?"

Lana shrugs. "I hear voices," she says dryly, and is rewarded with a snort as Obi-Wan steps off the Temple transport and onto the landing platform of the Senate rotunda.

* * *

"I assure you, Senator, you are a witness," Obi-Wan is saying calmly, to all the world absolutely unruffled by the flushed, angry visage of Senator Echellin of the Venaarian sector. Considering that Senator Echellin is a rather gruesome-looking man with one of the most suspicious scars Lana has ever seen, this is more impressive than one might think; Lana stands back, conscious of her quiet decision to let the Senators think what they want about her Padawanship. Obfuscation can be useful, after all. "Not a target. We are not searching for targets at this juncture—merely attempting to get a better picture of what has occurred."

Echellin leans back in his seat, jaw set, and his discontent roils in the Force. "My apologies, Master Jedi," says the man, completely insincere. "I merely find this investigation… superfluous."

The Venaarian sector, Lana recalls, had been among those that often curried favor with the Supreme Chancellor—particularly in recent years, with the ascendancy of Sheev Palpatine to the Chancellorship. It could mean nothing. It could mean everything.

But she's also heard that the Senator had been among those in the Senate most virulently opposed to the involvement of the Jedi in this affair. The Jedi have been in a tenuous position with the Senate since the disappearance of Count Dooku from the _Invisible Hand_ two years ago, despite widespread support among most of the populace of the Mid-Rim. The Venaarian sector is an exception; there are a handful of others, but with how Master Kenobi's latest deployment with Knight Skywalker had gone, many of the most vocal sectors have been far quieter.

That Venaari has not been quiet speaks more to Senator Echellin's personal stance on the matter of Jedi involvement in the war than it does to the feelings of the sector he represents—and isn't it curious that the tax benefits to Venaari's trading regulations have fallen back to below pre-war levels without the Chancellor to weigh in on it? Not only that, but speedily, too—far speedier than the Senate's usual pace, which is somewhere between the length of time it takes Bantooine pudding to ferment on Dantooine (there'd been a group of curious Padawans, once) and a couple trips back and forth to either rim of the known galaxy.

To her credit, she doesn't jump when Obi-Wan's presence brushes against her in the Force, an approving feeling emanating from him even as Echellin begins to start in on a decidedly undiplomatic rant about the Jedi. She hadn't realized she was broadcasting, but it could prove useful for things like this… provided their witnesses aren't Force-sensitive as well. Life can be surprising, sometimes.

Obi-Wan bows, cutting him off before he gets too far in. "On behalf of the Jedi, Senator Echellin, we wish you an excellent day. Come, Padawan."

Lana trots behind him as he exits, thrilled with the small show of defiance. They've been at this all day, and Lana is _capable_ of behaving in a diplomatic manner, but she and Master Keera had been slated to take on investigations before the war—not negotiate with politicians, though she supposes she probably ought to have expected that given the predilection politicians seem to have for getting involved in funny business. That her mission partner is famed for the very thing she detests is fortuitous indeed. If she's lucky, the only time she'll have to speak to someone is when the Force guides her to do so.

"A credit for your thoughts," Obi-Wan says as they round the corner and make their way into the winding interior of the Senate building.

Lana considers, tucking her hands into her robes. "It is remarkably interesting that the Senator remains staunch in his position given the recent offensive, Master."

"Ah, yes. The offensive." Obi-Wan lets out a breath of air that could've been a chuckle in another life. Lana carefully refrains from glancing at the brace on his leg. "The Senator is primarily disappointed that measures have not been taken to assure him of any continued supply drops for his sector—understandable, given that the main route to Venaari is currently skirting a thin line between accessible and inaccessible with the positions that have been taken by its neighbors. He is concerned that his proposed extension of the program is taking too long in the Senate, where before its three previous allowances had gone through quite speedily."

"Interesting," Lana says again as they step into the turbolift that will take them to the Supreme Chancellor's office—or, former office, probably. "And he blames the Jedi for this?"

Obi-Wan leans back against the wall of the lift and strokes his beard in thought. "Not exactly," he says after a moment. "He isn't wrong about the investigation, leastwise in regards to the Chancellor's death. The Chancellor _was_ old, by Human standards. But the Senate as a whole agreed when Bail Organa called for Jedi involvement in it. They all saw what happened to the poor man who touched that statue of King Jafan."

"It's a real shame that Force-based evidence is only barely accepted in the courts. That entire incident screamed _Force-based disaster,_ " Lana murmurs, frowning.

Obi-Wan straightens as the lift _dings_ and the door slides open. "Speaking of Force-based disasters—we're entering a zone with known Force-suffused objects. Exercise discretion, Padawan. If you feel something in the Force, trust your instincts and move as it commands you. This part of the investigation will be of particular interest to the Shadows."

"Understood. Shall I take notes?" Lana asks, prepared to whip out her handy-dandy datapad should the need arise.

He considers her for a moment. "Yes," he decides, looking pleasantly surprised. After living with Knight Skywalker for eleven years, her lack of recalcitrance must be some kind of relief. "That would be very helpful indeed."

Lana tries not to grin.

 _Master Kenobi_ said she'd be helpful! _Master Kenobi!_ Ha!

If she trots into the room with a rather cheerful step, well, nobody has to know about _that._

* * *

A dream:

Diaphanous beams connect hearts and minds across time and space; somewhere near hopelessness, a heartbroken man spins his ship around and puts off exile for another year. He always comes back to this desert, back to the place where the sands shaped a girl who became a warrior became a legend, but she is never here.

He didn't expect her to be. Nobody knows where she has gone, least of all him, and the silence in the back of his mind is as voluminous as the planet full of dry bones he has been orbiting around for three standard days.

But she could have left a clue, he thinks. He is nothing without her. They are two halves of a whole, one person, two bodies, and kriff it all—he _misses_ her. He misses her, because the darkness is back, and it is threatening to swallow him whole once more.

Lana Viszka Ruhr opens her eyes to the dark ceiling of her apartment in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. She is ostensibly twenty standard years of age, her heart beats in a frenetic rhythm full of an ageless terror, and she traps every secret she sees behind her mouth. The Force thrums with her when she reaches for it and curls in the direction of the wall, breathes out one shaky sigh and then another, reminds herself again that time is not linear and nothing is impossible with the Force.

"I didn't sign up for this," Lana says, staring with unseeing eyes at the wall. Somewhere several floors below her, a Padawan has just learned that their Master has passed into the Force; the mirror shard-sharp splinter of grief and agony pulses in time, embedding itself in the Force's loving veils, ebbs into a slow mourning that clouds the entire Temple and undoubtedly wakes the younglings up. It wasn't always this way—there was once a time when it would have spread fully into the Force, quelled by the Light, but the war has wrought havoc on the universe at a fundamental level that is horrifying to contemplate. So Lana doesn't.

Unsettled though she is, her own borrowed grief does not reverberate so. She has the questionable benefit of having inherited from her time with Master Keera what had once been the Jinn-Kenobi team's apartments, and the combined weight of the twin legacies she finds herself living under blunts the rawness of her visions. Like shadows, the Force echoes what once was: nearly invisible now, austerity and a numbness that slows courage; slightly less so, cool acumen and aching kept under the tightest of wraps. They linger despite their former owners having moved on, half-companions she never asked for in an isolation she chose.

There are many things she never _signed up_ for. Her path as a Jedi, despite everything she's told herself since the day she set out on it, has always been chief among the manifold decisions she had no part in.

 _I know,_ the silence whispers back, nameless. _I know._

 _Are you an I? Is that a thing?_ Lana asks. She might as well—she isn't getting back to sleep, not tonight.

Light unfurls, seeps into her soul, a slow drip meant to heal, not to burn. It is as much of an answer as anything is.

* * *

"So, Master, I found several reports on the kinds of objects we found in the Chancellor's office." Lana settles on the other end of the table from Obi-Wan, pulling out her datapad; she taps a few times until she pulls up the folder she created while Master Nu wasn't looking. Obi-Wan, for his part, is the picture of polite, rapt attention. Lana slides the 'pad over to him, opening a particular file as she does so. "My conclusion: If not Sith, at the _very least_ immersed in Darkness. Remember the way that pen on his desk radiated… well… _nothingness?_ The feeling matched up with that description, in particular."

Obi-Wan scans the 'pad, absently sliding a cup of tea over to her in return. Lana had watched him prepare it earlier; _sapir_ tea is harder and harder to get in Republic space these days, and she's not sure she wants to know how he manages to keep sufficient quantities of it in his apartments when he's drunk two cups already and she suspects that's him holding back more than anything. His eyebrows raise. Probably found the information about the touch-activated Force-draining components. "Oh my."

"Yeah." Lana sips her tea. It's some damn good tea. Letting it go to waste wouldn't be taking care of the resources the Force has apportioned to all Jedi; she also doesn't feel like being the one to bring up how _insanely suspicious_ it is that the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic _just so happens_ to be in possession of so many Dark objects—objects he left out in plain sight. Objects she knows for a fact were out in plain sight when Jedi walked past them.

If Lana is the one to point out what many legions of Jedi seem to have missed, or the troubling implications of that many Jedi having missed it in the first place, it's not going to get her or the investigation very far. Three years Temple-bound and immersed in the Force or no, she's still only a Padawan with a dead Master. If there was anything Barriss Offee's actions ever did for her fellow Padawans, it was to establish that they ought not be listened to in these trying times.

"Admittedly, I hadn't had the pleasure of visiting the Chancellor in his office for some time before his death," Obi-Wan is saying thoughtfully, one hand propping up the 'pad and the other stroking his beard in thought, "but I do seem to recall that he had… rather less in the way of furnishings on display in his office. It is quite unusual for a politician, much less a Senator, to be lacking in worldly trappings."

"He was lauded for that, wasn't he?" She phrases it like a question, but it's not. Sheev Palpatine built his reputation on humility and a concern for the wider galaxy.

Obi-Wan nods. "Indeed. It is very curious that he would be in possession of all those things and only begin to bring them out as the war ground to a standstill."

 _Things weren't going the way he wanted,_ Lana thinks, but doesn't voice it. Accusations cannot be made without proof; they can't be accusations in the first place, really, no matter how substantial the most heavily-encrypted folder on her datapad happens to be. Instead: "There are rumors on the HoloNet that his body has disappeared from the coroners' halls in the police headquarters."

"Baseless or standing on any form of evidence?" Obi-Wan is scanning further down the list, and she can sense his distaste through the Force—a very distinct, posh, palpable _ugh_ that is inextricably intertwined with his Light, one of the most hilarious dichotomies the Force has seen fit to gift her with.

 _A Jedi must be beyond humanity—_ thus had Kolasi Selook said in her _Meditations,_ a remarkably species-exclusive claim she was qualified to make only because she herself had been a Human at a time that the Jedi Order was largely dominated by them, and even then Lana knows the scholars among their number today (like the one across from her, who, if he hadn't taken up Generalship, probably could've taught the advanced philosophy courses available for Knights to partake of) consider Selook's justification for the exclusivity of the statement shaky. _Extremely_ shaky. _Would later suggest systematic culling as a method of eugenic study_ shaky. Still, the concept remains, and it's almost a relief to see that Obi-Wan still retains that element of humanity.

It means he's not untouchable. Not the perfect paragon the younger Knights and Padawans would paint him as.

"Hard to tell. Most of it is on the deep HoloNet, and most Jedi terminals disallow access. But I came across something from someone going by the codename of Fulcrum—here, let me see it—there." She pokes until the snapshot of Fulcrum's forum profile appears on the screen, accompanied by the post, seemingly queued up to go public in the dead of the Coruscanti night. _Do not make the mistake of thinking this is over,_ the post says. _There was more to that man than anyone in the galaxy wants to admit. That's why the body disappeared._

Attached to the post is a single grainy holo—an image of the head coroner wringing his hands over an empty table.

"That's what caught my attention," Lana says, leaning back in her seat and tucking her feet up onto the chair. He has very nice chairs, standard-issue or not. Like most Jedi, Obi-Wan's aesthetic taste looks to lean toward the minimalist, though she did spot a rather nice bowl with pretty rocks in it tucked away next to the windows when she came in. "I wouldn't have paid it any mind otherwise—but the image itself was heavily encrypted. Breaking through it took time, work, and a Jedi passcode I know for a fact hasn't been used in-Temple since the days when Master Windu was a Padawan. I'm reluctant to pass it off as nothing. There are few people who would know that—I only do because someone horribly mismanaged the class schedules one day and my Junior Padawan Core Diplomacy class was taught to do… things… that are probably illegal on several Core world planets by Master Tholme."

"Wait, really?" Obi-Wan asks, caught off-guard. Then his brow furrows. "Come to think of it, I _do_ remember something about that…"

Lana shrugs. Pointing out that Ahsoka Tano had also been in her class that day, an Initiate delivering messages who had lingered around a little while longer than was strictly necessary, would only serve to bring up memories that she's sure are delicate for him. "That incident _might_ be why Master Tholme is still off in the Unknown Regions. The Council was displeased. Us Padawans less so—but anyways, the point is, there's deliberation in the choice of encryption. It was a message for the Jedi, unless Archivist Nu's cabal of archive junkies are secretly masterminding a secondary organization beneath the modern wings of the Temple…"

Obi-Wan snorts—actually _snorts,_ honest-to-the-Force. "I think we may be quite certain that no such thing is at play in all this, Padawan."

"The Force works in mysterious ways," Lana says, prim but for the wicked curve of one side of her smile. "So, how do you weigh it?"

"It's difficult to base any solid facts on a single piece of rather grainy evidence," Obi-Wan muses. He takes a sip of his tea, then pauses. A small smile curls his lips up. "But I know someone who may be able to give us a further lead—see if there's any veracity to the claim. How do you feel about jawa juice and indigestion?"

Lana schools her face into a mask of serenity. "I've never experienced indigestion a day in my life," she declares. "Never ever. Certainly not at the hands of the Temple refectory staff."

"Ah. A dab hand already, I see." Obi-Wan stands with some visible stiffness in his left leg; as subtly as she can, Lana keeps an eye on how heavily he leans his weight on his right. He raises an eyebrow at her. "Well, then. Let's see what we can find out."


	3. Chapter 3

"Obi-Wan, if you're busy, you don't have to—" Padme Amidala is saying over the comm; Lana carefully thumbs through a document on her datapad that Dexter Jettster himself had given to her via datastick, giving Obi-Wan the illusion of privacy as best she can.

"Nonsense, Padme. Just give me an hour or two to finish up my business. I'll be along to assist after that," Obi-Wan says, leaning against the Temple-issue speeder. He's squinting in the midday sun, perhaps because he's chosen to fix his eyes on the shiniest building in the CoCo Town district.

Lana's brows raise as she gets to a pictorial representation of the galactic situation circa 3611. _Mandalore in chaos,_ she observes, watching as the looping image shows a deep burgundy blob spilling out of the core planet of the Mandalore sector; a year forward, and Concord Dawn has been engulfed by the same color. Nearby planets are bright pinpricks of red and orange and yellow, all according to danger level and frequency of open combat. _The Mandalorian Reformation had not been bloodless, despite best efforts by the Duchess and a team of Jedi negotiators. Though Mandalore is now peaceful, it had come at a cost that the Alliance of Neutral Systems is still recovering from twenty-five years down the road,_ the description below the graphic reads.

"What's that?" Obi-Wan asks, glancing at the infographic as they make their way to the speeder.

"Report on the impact of the Mandalorian Reformation," Lana mumbles, brows furrowing as she reads on. "I hadn't realized that Bandomeer was among the planets caught in the crossfire…"

Obi-Wan sighs, a deep, weary sigh that lets the universe out along with his breath. He starts the speeder engine. "That would be Dex's smokescreen—the _blighter._ See if there are any links in the middle of the study."

Lana looks. Sure enough, a single letter in the middle of a sentence about the Mandalorian Duchess is slightly discolored—a lighter shade of blue than the text itself. She taps it, pauses for a moment at the encryption key prompt that pops up, then inputs the numerical code Dex had slipped under her tall, frosty blue milkshake. The document that comes up makes her whistle. "This is as confirmed as I've ever seen anything, Master."

"Wonderful," Obi-Wan grumps, suspicion evident in the way he regards the drivers around them in the airlane.

"I suppose this means there's more going on—almost a relief, really. These kinds of things always do get so much more complicated. It's nice to know this _now_ instead of months down the line, when our only hope is an astromech with an attitude problem."

Obi-Wan glances at her. "Are you often in the habit of investigating the deaths of high-ranking personnel that guide the course of galactic civilizations?" he asks mildly, dodging a Twi'lek on a single-seat speeder with a calm that would be alarming if she couldn't see the way he's been clenching the steering wheel since they took off.

She gives him an amused smile. "Well, I have read rather a lot of mission reports from the Diplomacy specs…"

"Ah. Naturally."

"You might want to look out, Master. Looks like the Twi'lek is coming back for another go at us."

He sighs. "Blast. I suppose they couldn't resist the temptation of two Jedi outside of their normal habitat."

"Are assassination attempts that common outside the Temple?" Lana asks curiously, glad for the domed chassis of their speeder.

"Only for those in Investigation," Obi-Wan says after a moment of thought. He dives down one lane, then another. "Hold on. This could be a bumpy ride."

* * *

It's evening by the time Obi-Wan returns from looking after Anakin's children, and his spirit is unsettled. Well—moreso than usual. When one is a General on forced medical leave when one _ought to be_ fighting in an active war, one tends to be haunted by disquiet regardless of what one does; Obi-Wan just so happens to have received word from the front and three separate reports that corroborate on the fact that the Hutts have closed off their space to both the Galactic Republic and the Confederacy of Independent Systems for no clear reason, and they're not letting _anything_ through.

Anakin, halfway across the galaxy, does what Obi-Wan intellectually knows to be impossible: he sends a soothing pulse of calm over a training bond that should've shrunk to nothing in the time span they'd been apart after Anakin's Knighting. Obi-Wan's leg, an absolute bother of a thing, stops protesting as it has all day and instead settles on being mildly cantankerous when he extends it too far forward. He shakes his head as he tentatively directs gratitude in the direction of Anakin's omnipresent warmth. This far off, it's more like a hearth fire than a blazing supernova, _but it should still be impossible._

Much to his consternation, _impossible_ is a word in his rather extensive vocabulary that doesn't seem to be as valid a word to describe anything in his life as it once was. Qui-Gon's visit comes to mind; so do the gaggle of Jedi younglings progressing down the corridor with what some of the older Masters will undoubtedly view as undue excitement in their gaits. Obi-Wan has enough presence of mind to step out of the way. The Zabrak girl is the first to reach their destination; she tumbles to a stop in front of Lana Ruhr, who kneels down to meet her at eye-level.

"Hello there," Lana says, eyes sparkling as she reaches out to steady the Zabrak. She greets each youngling in turn—there are three of them, all with their childish excitement and joy bleeding into the Force. "How go the lessons, young ones?"

"We learned how to find planets, Padawan Ruhr," says the little Miralukan boy, grinning. Obi-Wan nods to himself without quite realizing it; the boy's accent is perfect, and if he hadn't _known_ that the boy hailed from Alpheridies, he'd have never thought it out of place.

The most unusual of the bunch, a Neti sapling brought back by Ood Bnar one of the rare times in galactic history he'd returned to Coruscant, gives Lana what is _probably_ a smile. It's hard to tell, seeing as the sapling is a particularly knotty one. "Lessons are… like sunlight. Master Yoda says so."

"Master Yoda is very wise," Lana agrees. "Why did he say that lessons are like sunlight?"

"I bet it's 'cause sunlight helps you grow, Sha," says the Zabrak. Eagerness dances around her signature; she has something to tell Lana, and she wishes to do so now, but she exercises self-restraint by waiting.

"The sun grows my body, and the Force grows my mind," Sha says, nodding.

Lana smiles again. "Make sure you listen to Master Yoda, yes? But don't be afraid to ask questions if you're confused. He enjoys spending time with you," she says, as if confiding a great secret. "If you ever get to hear him lecture in the foyer of the Residential Halls, he'll always say something along the lines of _entrusted with the future, we are, so nurture it, we should._ Then he opens the floor to questions. The Archivists say it's very edifying."

"I think I should like to be an Archivist," Sha says thoughtfully. "The Force flows so smoothly around them."

The Zabrak shakes her head. "Well, I don't! I need t'move 'round! Master Drallig said so once."

"That would be because you can never sit still, _Nawah,"_ the Miralukan boy informs her.

She sticks her tongue out at him and turns to Lana, wiggling closer than is strictly permitted for Jedi in the halls in order to tug at Lana's braid. Lana allows it; Nawah looks up at her, careful not to let the nubs on her forehead graze Lana's cheek. "What about you, Padawan Ruhr? You're a Senior Padawan now, aren'tcha? What are you gonna be?"

"The Force will show me what I am to be, Nawah. Just as it will show you," Lana says, reaching out and carefully patting Nawah on the head. "Remember: don't be afraid. When we begin to fear each other, we start to drift from what the Force has for us. United we stand…"

"…Apart we Fall," the three younglings chorus, looking up at her with adoring eyes.

She doesn't seem to notice. "It was very compassionate of you three to check up on me. Thank you for your concern, young ones, but please don't be late to your classes."

Nawah's eyes widen. "Oh no!"

"Let's go, Sha," the Miralukan boy says, grasping at both Sha's wrist and Nawah's. "It would not be wise for Nawah to miss the beginning of fourthlesson again."

"Hey," Nawah complains, and the three depart down the hall, arguing all the way. Lana watches them go, a small smile on her face. It fades when they turn the corner, something more like her usual reserve returning to her features.

"Master Kenobi," she says, approaching him without pretense. "Have you heard the news?"

"That would depend on what news you're speaking about in particular," Obi-Wan says, gesturing for them to continue on. He can see Jocasta Nu coming from some ways behind them, and he has no desire to see Lana subjected to a lecture on Jedi propriety—he's endured the sharp edge of Master Nu's tongue too many times to allow that fate to be inflicted upon anyone else.

Lana bobs her head, less a response, more a habit. "Hutt Space has gone silent, Master Kenobi. The HoloNet is buzzing, especially after the morning's rumors. No word from Fulcrum, though."

"You expected something from them?" Obi-Wan quirks a brow as they turn right. Lana is headed toward the salles; he had intended to return to his quarters and mull over the happenings, perhaps to meditate and connect with the Force, but something tells him that this is the first time she's actively sought anyone out for a rather long while.

She shrugs. If she's trying to do anything other than be a friendly, helpful mission partner, he can't sense it. "It's what those HoloNet personas do. Fulcrum, Variance, Kel Doraniq, Rogue One—they're all about keeping their finger on the pulse of galactic news, shining a light into the places the mainstream news outlets won't go to. Fulcrum's new, admittedly, but they're shaping up to run in the same circles."

"Rogue One," Obi-Wan says thoughtfully. "Where have I heard that name before?"

Lana tilts her head. "Hmm. Maybe the expose they did on Senatorial involvement in the slave trade on Ryloth—that'd've been a year ago, just about. I believe Master Billaba and her Padawan were aiding the local freedom fighters when the news broke. It went a long ways toward positive perceptions of the Jedi on the HoloNet. If I had a credit for every time I saw a post using that candid holo of her Padawan to mock the Senate, I'd be a rich woman by now."

"You certainly seem on top of things yourself." He tries not to seem _too_ curious—Jedi are permitted their hobbies so long as they remain able to give them up should the Force ask it of them, and keeping up with the news is a rather useful one for their investigation. She only gives him a smile, less pronounced than the overt warmth she gave the younglings freely, but still there.

"Being Temple-bound for three years helps you develop some interesting habits, Master Kenobi," she says, and palms the door to one of the smaller salles open. With a touch of anxiety she probably thinks she's hidden better than she actually has, she glances at him over her shoulder. "Care to spot me? I'm trying to teach myself Niman, and I'm afraid it isn't going very well."

The Force nudges him. _Go,_ it whispers. _Do._

Obi-Wan gives her a small smile. Wherever the Force leads, he will follow. "It'd be my pleasure."

* * *

 _It is a truth, if somewhat scandalous to speak, that the Force is not always with the Jedi. If one looks at the ebb and flow of the Order as a whole, it becomes clear that there have been periods in galactic history when the Jedi have been out of step with the will of the Force; in such times, other proponents of the Force take precedence. One example is the Guardians of the Whills, the millennia-old protectors of the Temple of the Kyber…_

"Lana?"

Lana looks up from her datapad. "Knight Justiss," she says mildly. "What seems to be the issue?"

Kai Justiss blinks, the only physical indication that he is in any way discomfited. He gives her a quick, uncertain smile. "Not that I'm one to talk, but… isn't it a tad early to be browsing the Archives?"

"Perhaps," Lana grants. Master Nu will not wake for another two hours, after all, and there is an unspoken rule about the Temple Archives: keep well away until Master Nu has come to the desk. Perhaps it has something to do with the way the shadow of the Dark Side has grown long, or with the reports by the younglings of unfriendly voices whispering to them in the night, promising power and glory if they only give in, or even with the tension in the air that the Jedi on guard duty bring with them. Like Kai.

"Firstmeal will be soon," Kai says after a protracted silence. "Perfect katas won't do you any good if you don't have the energy to perform them."

It's a rather gracious dismissal, all things considered. Lana gives him a tight-lipped smile and gathers her things. "I'll be reporting in to the Healers at 1000 hours," she says. "By all means, inform Master Che that she won't have to hunt me down today."

"May the Force be with you, Lana," Kai murmurs. Caught up in her musings as she departs, Lana doesn't really hear it.

* * *

"I'm afraid there's nothing distinct, Master," Lana says to Yoda's hologram. She shifts, uncomfortably aware of sitting cross-legged on a bed in the Healer's Ward as Vokara Che watches on. "There are—places I've never been before, gigantic spaceships that almost look like the Praxeums, pretty vistas, deserts. I was underwater once, feeling hunted, but there was nothing around me. And when I looked deeper, the Force jolted me awake. It was like being doused with cold water."

Yoda makes a contemplative noise. _"Purposeful, the Force is. Of these 'pretty vistas', tell me you must."_

"One was a jungle," Lana says, heart jumping into her throat with a sudden anxiety. Yoda never quite inquires further into her visions, particularly not when he's taken the 44th Legion out on deployment. If he's bothering to ask now— "It was evening, and I was standing in front of a stone temple. It looked abandoned. I knew it was very old. There was a dark presence nearby—not in the temple, I don't think, but it was watching me. Just watching. When I realized it was watching, it laughed at me; it started to say something I didn't fully hear. _This is not going to go,_ or something like that, and the rest of the sentence was cut off. Then I was underwater."

" _Concerning, this is,"_ Yoda says. Lana nods. _"Many jungles in the galaxy, there are. Difficult, finding it will be."_

"Pardon?" Lana asks. Vokara coughs, but when Lana glances over, Vokara's face is serene and free of emotion.

Yoda taps his gimer stick, a motion that doesn't quite have the same impact when he's in holographic form. _"Meditate on this, I will. Focus on your investigation, you must."_

"Yes, Master," Lana murmurs, frowning.

" _So eager are you to know the Grand Master's business, Padawan Ruhr? Center yourself on the present moment, you must. Investigation you have to carry out."_ Yoda _harrumphs_ at her. _"In tune with their surroundings, a Jedi_ must _be. Assess how well you have followed this, I will, when I return."_

Lana feels her face burning. None of Yoda's projects are spared personal dignity, she knows, but he always has a way of cutting to the heart of the matter that cuts her down to size along with it. "Yes, Master."

"Take care, Master," Vokara cuts in gracefully, taking pity on her patient; she and Yoda exchange goodbyes, and the hologram winks out of existence. Vokara turns to Lana, a crisp motion that sets her robes aflutter. "I didn't have to have you hunted down today, Padawan Ruhr. Are you feeling alright?"

 _I was,_ Lana thinks, but it is impertinent, and the Jedi are no fun. Instead, she shifts on the bed and stares somewhere above and to the left of Vokara's head. "My dreams have been dark, as of late."

"You say that every time," is the chiding response as Vokara strides over to the bedside table and picks up Lana's patient chart.

"Unfortunately, it remains true," Lana replies, dipping her head. "Forgive me. I've been unable to employ your teachings properly."

Vokara hums, looking over the chart. "You're no healer, Padawan Ruhr, but something tells me you were never meant to be. The Force guides us all to our proper places."

"But what happens when the Force doesn't illuminate the path, Master Che?" Lana crosses her arms and studies the cracked tiles on the ceiling. _Perhaps it's a matter of an answer the Force has veiled for some reason, or a step of faith that must be taken…_

Vokara glances at her half-heartedly, then again, sharper, body tensing ever-so-slightly as her eyes dart across Lana's tiny form. There is something guarded in the Healer's eyes, if amused, that Lana has never quite seen before. "The Force is _always_ illuminating the path, Padawan," she says. With a wave, Lana's chart slots itself back into the folder that Vokara seems to carry with her permanently these days. Her lekku twitch. "If one cannot see it, then perhaps they ought to look deeper in a way they have not before, no? If the door is not open, look for a window."

"That's not very honorable," Lana says after a moment of thought. It's not a disagreement.

"To save lives, Padawan, one must occasionally go beyond the traditional lines of thinking," Vokara says dryly. She gestures for Lana to get up, a sharp motion that belies the softness of her hands. "Now, away with you. Stars know I've had enough philosophers in here today."

Lana waits until she's at the door to speak. She'd seen the visitor's log on her way in to her appointment. "Master Kenobi sure is a handful, isn't he?"

"Out, brat," is Vokara's irritated response. Lana smiles to herself. _Success._

* * *

As Lana exits, the Force tugs at her navel—an insistent sense of _follow me,_ dancing on the edges of her sixth sense. Lana puts a hand on the counter, ignoring the inquisitive glance of the Healer Padawan minding the desk. _What?_ she thinks, surprise bleeding over and into the almost-physical hold the Force has on her. She shakes her head, pushing that aside for the moment. _What is it?_

Again the sense manifests itself. Whether it's the call of a ghost so old it has forgotten how to show itself before physical eyes or the Force choosing a direct way of making its wishes known, Lana is a servant; it is her duty to follow, so she does. Lost in a haze, she hardly notices the winding path she takes down lesser-used hallways and half-abandoned turbolifts. The Force urges her to _pay attention,_ but the feeling of being so deeply immersed in it is so rare nowadays that Lana shakes her head and reaches further—

Abruptly, she finds herself bereft of the floating calm and quite by herself in a disused entrance chamber. The Force hovers just beyond her perception, there if she should need the abilities it grants her, but otherwise denying her the comfort of an easy meditative state. Lana bows her head for a moment, ashamed of herself. Some days, she is no better than the legends the people of Ikamra tell of the boy, Ikkaru, who flew too close to the sun; she knows better than some that the Force is not a _thing_ , to be used in the pursuit of one's own glory, but separation from it as Coruscant grows darker with the shadows of war has been—difficult, particularly when she only ever seems to fully find it in her dreams.

 _I apologize, for whatever it's worth,_ Lana thinks at the energy field that binds the universe together, feeling quite silly.

No response.

"Right," she murmurs. "Shouldn't have expected it. To business, I suppose. What's brought me here?"

Nothing, apparently. Nothing obvious. Lana looks around the bare chamber, a frown on her lips. There is purpose in the Force's every leading, even when that leading is to walk into rooms in the Temple that can't have possibly been used in at _least_ three decades.

Her eyes fall on the door. Light from outside, scant and undoubtedly electronic, shines through the thin crack between the two halves of the door; beside it, a numpad glows a soft, impossible green, considering that the Temple technicians have taken to consolidating most of their power usage in the areas of the Temple that people actually live in.

She glances at the wall, and at the sight of the cool burnished metal characteristic of all the older parts of the Temple, she remembers that she doesn't have anyone to exchange glances with. Shaking her head, she approaches the door.

"…safe here," filters in from beyond, a mechanized voice produced by a voice modulator. Lana pauses.

"You're sure they'll listen?" comes a man's voice.

 _Shhhk-hiss._ A sigh. Lana forces herself to breathe out. "Just ask for Master Kenobi. If there's anyone in there who'd listen to sense, it's him."

"Fulcrum!"

A silence.

"Thank you for everything."

"Repay me by relaying the message to Master Kenobi," is the brisk reply. Lana wastes no time; she dashes over to the numpad and jabs in the code she's watched Master Mar-Suu use to unlock the balcony entrance on the fifteenth floor. As the door opens, the cool light of the streetlamp spills in and combines with the warm underlights of the entrance chamber, making the metal almost look like it emits a soft glow; in front of her, a tall, dark-skinned man with dark hair that falls to his back in curly ringlets stares down at her in surprise. He's dressed in nondescript pedestrian clothes, a sure attempt to blend in that does not quite work with how distinctive his high-boned, elegant face is.

Lana blinks and scans the area behind him. No Fulcrum in sight. _Blast._

"Ah… hello?" the man ventures uncertainly, a hesitant smile on his face. "I've a message for General Kenobi…"

"Many do," Lana replies, tilting her head. His eyes bounce from her dangling braid to her face. He has a kindly face, and his signature in the Force doesn't radiate overt hostility, but she has to be sure. "He's a man in high demand, I'm afraid. What makes your message of note?"

"I've been working with the coroners in charge of the Chancellor. I know what happened to the body," he says, and the faint, unconscious way his hands shake as he speaks is what clinches it for her.

Lana gestures to the chamber as she scrabbles for her comm. "Come in. I'll get you to him. Got a name?"

"Daud. Daud Antema," he says as he follows her in. The Force ripples, the ringing gong of destiny making its garrulous presence known once more in her life; Daud looks around, rubbing his arms. "I didn't know the Jedi kept bells."

 _He's Force-sensitive,_ Lana marvels, staring at her comm and willing Obi-Wan to pick up quickly. _A Force-sensitive witness._ "We don't."

"Then what—"

" _Kenobi,"_ comes Obi-Wan's voice from the comm. Daud quickly shuts his mouth. _"Is something the matter, Padawan Ruhr?"_

"You could say that, Master Kenobi. We've got a witness that backs up what we learned the other day. West side, fourth floor, down the dusty turbolift and hang a left."

" _I'll be right there."_


	4. Chapter 4

"Excuse me, Miss Ruhr," Daud says as she guides him to the turbolift entrance. He's been trying not to be too obvious in the way he looks around, but that he's never been in the Temple or even near a Jedi before is plain to see. Though she can't read his mind, not with the steel of his will putting up an unconscious wall around his thoughts, she can read his amazement in the wideness of his eyes and—most telling—the way his mouth hangs slightly open.

It's rather flattering, actually, considering what she's heard about most of Coruscant and their feelings on the Jedi. Lana glances at him. "Yes?"

"Forgive me for not asking before, but—what's your name? Your first name," he adds with a smile when Lana raises a brow at him.

"Ah, I suppose I haven't introduced myself, have I?" she says, stopping in front of the turbolift, struck by the thought that destiny is not all that convenient, even when it is pleasant. She gives him a light bow. "Forgive me—this all happened rather quickly. My name is Lana Viszka Ruhr, Jedi Padawan. A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Daud Antema."

"The pleasure is all mine," Daud says, nearly reaching out for a handshake; at the last moment he thinks better of it and nods, stuffing his hands into his pockets. "How big is this place? This seems quite a ways away from the main entrance…"

Lana's eyes crinkle at the corners as she smiles. "Oh, nobody really knows. It's an ancient structure, after all. This is an older part of it, in fact—usually, this area is disconnected from the power lines."

"I see." Daud digests this bit of information with furrowed brows and an intent look of concentration. "Then… I was expected?"

"We are all connected to each other through the Force," she says, spreading her hands. "Expected or not, you are here. A surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one."

Daud eyes her wide grin a bit strangely. "You know, I think I might actually be able to believe that, after what's happened to me."

"Ah, yes. Your testimony." Sobered, Lana tucks her hands into her robes and regards him with a level look as the turbolift door opens. Daud's gaze darts to the doorway as Obi-Wan swings himself down onto the floor and flicks a bit of dust away from his tunic. "First things first: we, the Jedi, will not in any way, shape, or form identify you as the witness to the incident. Cases that heavily involve use of the Force, as this case clearly does, often involve dangers to one's person that would not otherwise be an issue. We do not wish to put you in any further danger than you already have by volunteering to tell your story. Secondly: Master Kenobi, did you cut through the elevator shaft?"

"It wasn't working, I'm afraid. Whether it will work again or not is not my purview," Obi-Wan says with a tiny smirk that is mostly hidden by his beard. Lana rolls her eyes—Vokara won't be happy about that leg of his—but lets it go. Obi-Wan turns to Daud. "You are our witness, I presume?"

"That's me," Daud says, a trace of ironic fondness in his voice. He crosses his arms. "The witness."

Lana and Obi-Wan exchange glances. _He's Force-sensitive,_ Lana thinks, smile winning. _Recovered rather well from the shock of exposure to a Jedi, too._

Obi-Wan blinks, like he's actually understood what she'd tossed in his general direction, then shakes his head and gestures down the long hallway. "We'll have to find another turbolift. We can talk on the way—it's certainly long enough. Follow me, Mister…?"

"Antema," Daud supplies as they start along the path. Ancient lights flicker on at the juncture between the walls and the ceilings as they go. "Daud Antema."

Obi-Wan dips his head. "A pleasure, Daud. I am Obi-Wan Kenobi, Jedi Knight—and you've met my mission partner, Padawan Ruhr. Do tell us what you can; it is our duty, as Jedi, to listen."

"I suppose the best place to start is the destruction of my ship. I'm a pilot by trade, see, for the Naboo. But—well, I'm afraid demand for plasma is through the roof nowadays, particularly in Hutt Space, and I was attacked. I only escaped thanks to my droid." Daud pauses for a moment, thoughts clearly lingering on his droid; Lana sends a pulse of sympathy his way without quite meaning to. Obi-Wan glances at her. Daud relaxes a tad. "I wound up on Coruscant, and through a connection with a friend, I managed to land a job with the coroners in the main branch of the Coruscanti General Hospital—physical labor, janitor work, that sort of thing. Not very pleasant, but it paid well, and I need a new ship."

Lana tilts her head. _Hutt Space closed its physical borders off yesterday—it's been rough for anyone but the smugglers, according to the HoloNet. Possible relation?_

"I just… I can't say I expected the Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic to up and die, you know? Much less to be on the crew that brought his body in. Looking back, I think the first clue that something was wrong was what happened when one of my coworkers accidentally brushed against the bust of some old politician…"

"We heard about that. Word was that it threw him against the wall and put him in the hospital," Obi-Wan says.

Daud nods, wincing. "Yes. After that, we kept away from the decorations. I was put on guard duty, and I started to notice strange things—my coworkers coming to work with vacant looks in their eyes, one of the coroners coming to and from the Chancellor's resting place at odd hours. I was on call the night the body vanished. The only other person with me was an Umbaran woman I'd only met a couple days before; she was staring like the others, and didn't seem to be, well, all there. When I tried to ask her a question, she turned to me… and… ah, this is the difficult part."

"Go on," Obi-Wan encourages as they turn right, starting down another old hallway.

Daud sucks in a breath. "She started speaking in crazy. It was like—hissing. I've heard a lot of languages, but never something like that, never something that sounded so…"

"Ominous?" Lana asks.

"Dark," he says, frowning, and appears oblivious to the implications. Obi-Wan and Lana exchange glances. Daud blinks. "Was that important?"

"We'd need to hear more, if you're willing to describe it," Obi-Wan decides, tucking his hands into his robes.

"I… the best thing I can think of is that it was like a snake," Daud offers after a moment of thought. "But not just any galactic variety snake. It sounded… ancient. Like the great old wyrms said to exist on the mountains of Naboo in ancient times. The draigons."

"Jedi legend holds records of them as well, I believe," Lana muses.

Obi-Wan hums. "But they are traditionally viewed as Sithspawn in our records, Padawan Ruhr."

"If that's the case—" Lana starts.

"—then we have found a possibility to investigate," Obi-Wan says, favoring her with a Masterly smile.

Daud looks between them, amused. "Do Jedi do this sort of thing often?"

"Depends on the Jedi," Obi-Wan returns. He gestures to Daud, magnanimous, and steps forward to press the button for the main Temple hololift. "Please, do continue. The story doesn't sound like it's over."

"The rest is a bit of a blur, Master Jedi," Daud says; he shivers at the remembrance of things since passed, or perhaps the cool temperatures often found in this level of the Temple. His outfit is not nearly as insulating as a Jedi's. "She attacked me, the lights started flickering, the shadows were moving without a light to guide them, and there were several loud noises in the room with the body. Shouting, too. Some swearing. Might've been me—I can hold my own in hand-to-hand, but this woman was on another level. I would've died if Fulcrum hadn't shown up and rescued me."

"Fulcrum?" Lana asks, careful not to seem too interested.

"The new Holonet starrunner that's been wreaking havoc online," Daud explains. "I think. They said there was a story the galaxy needed to know, and that I needed to bring a message to Master Kenobi here."

Obi-Wan blinks. "Oh?"

"Yes. I was to tell you what happened to me, and to pass this on to you: _Fives was right. Talk to Rex."_

"Fives…" Obi-Wan looks well and truly baffled. "What would he—? _Oh."_

"Master Kenobi?" Lana asks; though his face remains the perfect picture of confusion, simmering just beneath the surface of his thoughts is a cold, numb sensation, one that concerns her.

Obi-Wan shakes his head. "It's nothing. Nothing that can be attended to now, at any rate. Thank you for relating your experiences, Daud. If you will consent to it, I would like to have one of our Healers examine you. It sounds like you came out alright," he adds at Daud's alarmed look, "but you almost certainly had some level of exposure to the Dark Side. If any residue lingers, they are exceptionally skilled at wiping it away."

Lana does not snort loudly at Obi-Wan's glowing praise of the Healers, though she very much wants to. All the Jedi regularly in the Temple know that the Skywalker-Kenobi team have two beds reserved for them in the medbay, and most of the Jedi that have been around long enough to remember know that Obi-Wan didn't suddenly start getting into trouble when he took on Anakin Skywalker as an apprentice—if anything, Anakin enabled and enhanced his Master's propensity for overcomplicating situations, much to the collective exasperation of the Order.

"Padawan Ruhr can attest to their healing acumen," Obi-Wan says innocently, sensing her train of thought. Daud's eyebrows shoot up.

 _Ugh,_ she thinks. She turns and gives Daud a sweet smile, already aware of the impertinence that's about to escape her tongue and finding herself readily accepting of the consequences. _I could've sworn that I finally got my shielding in order, but I guess that skill is what it means to be a Master._ "But Master Kenobi is a far more experienced patient than I've ever had cause to be."

"Ah, let's not get our records confused, here. I may be the more experienced patient by virtue of the wisdom of age, but Padawan Ruhr is rivaled only by Knight Skywalker in terms of the frequency of her visits."

"Oh yes," Lana retorts, struggling to keep the grin off her face. "Weekly checkups are so very notable. Particularly when they are for actual injuries, wouldn't you agree?"

"Perhaps we ought to be concerned about how frequently you injure yourself, Padawan Ruhr," Obi-Wan observes blandly, a wicked glint in his eye. Lana's mouth drops open as the turbolift chimes; Obi-Wan turns to Daud, all business. "Will you come with us to the medbay, Daud?"

Daud shrugs, looking between the two, considerably more relaxed than before. "It sounds like I'll be in good hands. You've my thanks, Master Jedi."

 _Kind tongues, on the other hand, you may be in want of,_ Lana thinks, thinning her lips so as to hide her smile. She keeps the thought to herself.

* * *

"Back again, voluntarily, in one day? You'll understand if I check the two of you for concussions," Vokara snipes as she sweeps into the waiting room, lekku twitching. Lana and Obi-Wan both give a polite cough. A startled silence falls. Lana blinks at Obi-Wan while Vokara watches, arms crossed.

"I do believe that will be unnecessary, Vokara, though your care and concern is noted," Obi-Wan says smoothly, pulling on his most winning smile. That Vokara remains unimpressed is a testament only to how long she has known the Negotiator. Hard to put a man on a pedestal when you've watched him grow up, Lana muses. Harder still to fall for what she's taken to calling _the Kenobi effect_ in the privacy of her mind. That smile has melted Senators—the most notorious melting pot of scummy, runny-nosed schemers known to the galaxy. "We've another patient for you today."

"Daud Antema," Daud says, stepping forward and bowing his head in lieu of the handshake he visibly has to prevent himself from offering.

"He may have come into contact with the Dark Side without his knowledge. After hearing his story, I thought it prudent to have him checked by you." Obi-Wan's tone is low as he speaks, and Lana senses a spike of fear from the much-younger Padawan now manning the desk. Without looking, Lana brushes across the girl's presence. It's a simple motion, learned from the creche, as simple as breathing even through the viscous film of murky darkness that lies over the Force like a miasma. The girl ducks her head and returns her attention to her work.

"Ah, I see." Vokara, not unsympathetic, gestures for Daud to follow her. "Come along, then. Padawan Ruhr, I'll ask you to remain until we're done."

"Of course, Master." Lana dips her head. Daud bids them farewell with a smile. _May the Force be with you,_ she thinks, closing her eyes for a moment. _It certainly has purpose in this._ When she opens them, it's just her, Obi-Wan, and the Padawan manning the desk. Obi-Wan strokes his beard absently, brows furrowed, but looks up at her gaze.

"I trust you had good reason for admitting him, Padawan Ruhr, but that was all rather sudden," he says, shifting his weight off the leg that's in a brace. _If he really scaled that entire elevator shaft,_ she thinks, eyes flitting toward the motion, _it's no wonder it's throbbing now._ "What led you to that area of the Temple? I don't think anyone but the cleaning droids have been in there for years."

Lana hums in thought. "Destiny, I think."

Caught up in trying to put it into words, she misses the glance from the girl at the desk and Obi-Wan's raised eyebrow.

"It seems like Fulcrum has taken a special interest in our investigation," she elaborates, not really looking at him so much as the light refracting off the transparisteel windows, warming up to her own thoughts. "Or, at the very least, an interest in the same issue. I was caught in a trance, I think, a waking one. When I arrived, Daud was speaking to someone I assume to be Fulcrum. I didn't manage to speak to Fulcrum, but when Daud introduced himself… have you ever felt like the Force was singing, Master Kenobi?"

"I can't say I have, no," he says mildly. "I take it you have?"

Lana ducks her head. "It's not as mad as it sounds. I haven't heard it since the war began. But there are rare times when it almost seems to resonate with a kind of cosmic beauty—to me, it sounds like music. Like the kind of thing you'd hear in a theater, only more… luminous. A rolling crescendo of destiny, or a tolling bell. The bell sounded for him, if you will."

Obi-Wan looks at her for a long moment, a soft edge to his consideration of her that had been absent before. He smiles, close-lipped and faint, something brighter peeking through his worn corners and lending a little life to the crow's feet at the corners of his eyes. "You acted as the Force guided you to. Well done, Padawan Ruhr. In these times, that is eminently difficult."

"As a body, we have so little time to listen," Lana says. She shrugs, tucking her arms into her oversized robe, and the light in her memories flares bright and blazing. "Me, well, I've been given plenty of it. Time, I mean."

* * *

The thing about Anakin Skywalker is that he is more than a Jedi.

He is a man. A brave man, a courageous one, beloved by the Republic. How could they not, after how he has fought for them, after how much he has sacrificed for them? Coruscant turns its nose up at his very public forbidden marriage to Padmé Amidala, but this is not an opinion shared by the galaxy. Coruscant's bluebloods and snobs, anyways, and what do they know about valor? Skywalker and Amidala both are the champions of the people—the warrior and the peacekeeper, intrinsic opposites, innately matched. Let love be love, most will say, carefully sidestepping the little-understood tenets of the Jedi Order. They have honor enough to trump their dissenters many times over.

Anakin Skywalker is young and handsome, not only a Jedi Knight but a General too, and the galaxy calls him _The Hero With No Fear._

So when his eyes go distant and glassy in that way his men know well enough to be indicative of that fancy-schmancy Force stuff, and when the blood drains from his face and he snaps back to reality, the damndest sort of breathless horror overtaking his expression, Rex is already at his side. The _Valiant_ may be a _Venator_ -class flagship, but size is no match for the efficiency of a vod when their General looks to be in need of massive quantities of calm. Again.

"Sir," Rex says, and waits until Anakin looks at him. "What do you need from us?"

Anakin's hand lands on his shoulder. His smile is tight and faint, a little tinny, but well-meant. "Captain, I'm going to need to ask you some questions about Fives."

 _Oh,_ Rex thinks, drawing in a breath. Just because it's been years doesn't mean the sting of loss is any less.

* * *

 **k'oyacyi - Mando'a. "1. Cheers!, 2. Hang in there, or 3. Come back safely. Literally, a command-'Stay alive!'"**

 **vod - Mando'a. Universal (no specific gender delineation). "1. Brother, 2. Comrade/friend, 3. Sister"**

 **Sourced from the Mando'a dictionary.**


	5. Chapter 5

A memory:

It is well past firstlesson, and the Jedi Temple's ivory walls burn bright under the dim heat of the sun. Lana Viszka Ruhr is something like six standard years of age, but she knows as well as any Coruscanti child that if the planetary weather control system hadn't completely eroded the original climate of Coruscant, it would be too cold to venture outdoors right now. She shifts, glancing at the other Initiates, all milling about the planetarium in varying states of confusion. Some hide their unease better than others—Hiram, the Fosh boy with no surname, looks out at their fellow Jedi-in-training with a calm that Lana can only define as ancient—but for the most part, they can all feel the quiet tension as the hour wears on and no one makes an appearance to instill wisdom in them.

Something flickers at the edge of her vision.

Lana blinks, and the world around her shifts.

The afternoon light becomes the cool artificial glow of a series of industrial-grade striplights. Day ceases to exist—there is only Lana, the steady hum of machinery in the metal walls, and the Padawan holding a Jedi Master with long hair and a worn face close to his chest. To the side are two lightsabers, tossed on the floor; there are scuff marks and gashes in the floor, furrows where the plasma blades traced their deadly arcs.

"Master," the young man says, twenty-five and breathtakingly lost, but there is no response. His face twists; even here, he fights his tears. It isn't much use. "Master!"

It is not the first time Lana has seen loss. But it is the first time she's felt it curl in her soul, the Padawan's pain echoing in her like it's her own, and Lana gasps, falling to her knees. The motion jars her, jumbled senses dulled by the intensity of grief, and she blinks again, and again, and Hiram has a hand on her shoulder in the Jedi Temple, red eyes sad and knowing. They're both standing up. It's like she never moved at all.

"It's begun," he says, and no one else seems to notice. Lana's classmates are all distracted by the appearance of Ali-Alaan, the crechemaster; it has been a half-cycle since they had seen him last, and they are eager to catch up, but Ali-Alaan's brow is knit together with worry—the equivalent of a normal man's full-faced frown—and he is trying to get them to exercise Jedi calm.

Since Ali-Alaan seems busy, Lana turns to Hiram. She glances at his robes, then hers, and is struck by how _small_ they are, how tiny, how bony the jut of her collarbone is. The rough-spun fabric of the Initiate tunic does not do much to hide the frailty of its wearer. Master Yoda, she thinks, would have something to say about that. _"Meg vaabir gar_ —sorry. What do you mean?"

But Hiram shakes his head. "I don't know. It's begun, though. Can you feel it? The Force is moving."

It isn't exactly fair to expect a child who still remembers her homeworld to be able to touch the Force that deeply already. Lana closes her eyes anyways and reaches out with care, wanting nothing but to know, and the Force—the Force is kind to her, swirls in kind, some kind of concession. _Look,_ Lana imagines it saying. _Look, I am always with you, ad'ika._

Lana looks with her mind and sees. The Force is indeed shifting, like a long-lost ancient thing spinning into motion, rusty gyroscopes slowly turning in the axles of a _me'sen'ika-iviin_ , a _can'gal_ gearing up to take part in another piece of an old, old battle. _"Bic's kandosii'la,"_ she breathes, her native tongue the only one she knows well enough to express her amazement.

"Come, Lana," Hiram says, touching her arm. Lana opens her eyes. Hiram tilts his head, whiskers quivering, feathers a shade of muted green. "Come. We must fall into line—Master Ali-Alaan said."

She isn't sure what standing in a single-file line will accomplish, but she remembers her mother's words: _look at us, Lana, we are not gone from you, not never. We are merely marching far away. Be good for the Jedi, for those who will teach you to be a warrior. Be good to those who will call you_ vod.

"I wonder what this means," she muses as she and Hiram join their fellows. Hiram doesn't answer, but his feathers start looking orange at the edges.

* * *

In the present day, Lana is seated at her kitchen counter, bent over her compilation of evidence while she waits for the caff to finish brewing. "I wonder what this means," she mumbles to herself, a frown on her face as she scans a Senatorial aide's statement for the third time; something in it seems _off,_ a niggling sense of disquiet about the way the woman had phrased her words that keeps tickling the back of her mind, but she can't figure out what it is that's setting her internal alarms off. After another read-through, she leans back with a frustrated groan, setting her datapad down. "This is impossible! _Vhykr vodr_ , if I had a credit for every witness statement that's got an agenda of its own…"

"If _I_ had a credit for every time the word _impossible_ has been used in these apartments, I'd be a very rich, very dead man," Qui-Gon Jinn calls from the central room of her quarters—probably floating over her meditation cushion, too, she hasn't quite been able to bring herself to go and check.

Lana sighs to herself. "My apologies, Master Jinn," she calls back, turning to the caff receptacle with undue eagerness when it chimes and its little pinprick light blinks blue. With a flick, the datapad's reader screen is turned off; she grabs her waiting mug and fills it with caff, letting out another sigh (though a far happier one) when the enticing, rich aroma of the dark liquid fills the air. Her stroll into the central room is really more of a saunter. Qui-Gon raises a repressive eyebrow, severe even through the blue glow, and sure enough—he's taken over the cushion. Lana pauses and rearranges her features into a serene expression; only then does she sit and take a sip of her drink. "What brings you here?"

"What brings a Jedi anywhere?" Qui-Gon counters, tucking his hands into his sleeves.

She tilts her head, considering the question for a moment, then she speaks. "The basic Jedi answer is 'the Force', as generations of tradition hold. Your name is still known as one of the finest examples of following the Living Force. But it is my last wish to be presumptuous, Master Jinn."

"Ah. And by the admission of the desire, you prove that you have, on some level, been fearful. From whence does fear spring, Padawan Ruhr?"

Lana frowns. "Well… it's debated in some circles. The usual belief is that fear springs from a position of having something and not wanting to lose it, because it is enriching in some way—take the account of the life of Ulic Qel-Droma, after his severance from the Force by Nomi Sunrider. He only found peace in training Sunrider's daughter in the ways of the Force. Though whether he returned to the Light or not is a matter of serious historical debate, come to think of it—Master Jinn?"

"Yes, Padawan Ruhr?" Though Qui-Gon's facial expression hasn't changed, something in the Force still echoes with a remembered contentment—a pale shadow of a radiant thing, a glimmer of what once was peeking through some shadowed veil. Lana takes another sip of caff and shakes her head. Qui-Gon smiles in acceptance, the creases at the corners of his eyes crinkling. "You will find that the truth often makes its home in places the Force alone can guide one to. Even fear cannot stand in the way of the Force in its fullness."

At his words, Lana understands what the purpose of his visit is. She sets her caff down carefully on the floor and dips her head in respect. "Thank you for your instruction."

"You are welcome," Qui-Gon says, serene beyond sentient reckoning. She can only dream of the depths of the way in which the Force must flow through him.

She picks up her caff again and takes a long sip. "I'm being taught the Force by ghosts," she says, half to him, half to the room. "I never expected anything like this."

Qui-Gon lets out an amused huff of… not-air, she supposes, a soundless motion infused with an exasperation without teeth. "Most… ghosts, as you put it, are not like Jedi ghosts, Padawan. Come, let us meditate on your problem. Sometimes it takes two to see what one could not alone."

* * *

Obi-Wan scowls at his leg.

His leg, tragically, remains unresponsive to his attempts to soothe the pain with the Force.

"Blast it," he mutters, stumping his way down the hall to the turbolift. There is a small comfort: Anakin had not only willingly opened his mind to him, he had also agreed to ask the clones about Fives without noticeable rancor, the most willing candor he's given Obi-Wan in well over a year. Obi-Wan steps into the turbolift and taps the button for the fifteenth floor. When the door slides closed, he leans the back of his head against the wall and exhales. It's a difficult thing, raising a Padawan, raising a boy. It had been hard at first, a new Knight and a newer Padawan, learning to live together with the shadow of a dead man hanging over them both. He'd thought that to be his most difficult trial, then.

He had been wrong. It is harder still to let Anakin go—it had been harder from the moment Anakin was Knighted, the most impossible task in the galaxy not to worry about how well he was getting on. Obi-Wan will never think of the war as a good thing, not with the things he's seen, but merely working with Anakin (arguments and all) these past two years has served to put many of his worries to rest.

Anakin Skywalker is better than a perfect Jedi, in Obi-Wan's admittedly biased opinion. He is an _imperfect_ Jedi, as Qui-Gon would have said. And Obi-Wan could not be more proud.

The thought stinks of _attachment._ With Anakin in his life, he's long since given up on the luxury of pretense—if only within the confines of his own mind.

A small, ironic smile curls the edges of his lips. It quickly vanishes when the turbolift chimes and the door opens; to his complete lack of surprise, Lana waits a few feet back from the door, hands tucked into her robes and feet spread evenly. "Master Kenobi," she says as she dips her head, the practiced nature of her Coruscanti lilt more and more easily detectable to his ears. "I've compiled the Senators' statements, as well as their aides, in a single document for ease of reading. They all have agendas."

"Of course they do," Obi-Wan sighs, joining her. "Did anything stand out to you?"

She hesitates. "Mas Amedda," she says, caution clear, glancing at him as if finally giving voice to a long-held suspicion after an unwilling silence. "And Sly Moore. Their statements were the only ones that matched."

"Really. The _only_ ones?"

"Yes, Master. I checked twice. Both spoke of the same basic progression of events that night—the Chancellor finished a meeting with them, retired to his office to continue working, ordered tea in the middle of the night, and seven hours later had a heart attack. It would be preferable if we could view the security footage to confirm…" Lana palms her door open and waves him in. She sets off for the kitchen. Only when Obi-Wan is standing alone in the central room does the reality of his location hit him.

He had lived here.

Obi-Wan draws in a breath and casts out for the Force, letting it flow through him and wash away the impurities that cling so tenaciously to his soul. "That will be difficult," he replies when he's sure his voice won't catch on the weight of the memories he carries with him. "The Senate security team is both remarkably skilled and entirely unwilling to cooperate with Jedi, owing to an incident with a rogue Jedi some decades past. I believe they are keeping a tight hold on any information they have, at the moment."

"And I suppose the police would have informed us if there had been any violent interlocutors," Lana muses, reappearing with two mugs and a steaming pot of Corellian varlin tea—not his preferred variety, but not bad by any means. "Forgive me—it was hardly a salient thought. It's just… the visions. There's one that's been recurring for months now. The Chancellor standing over a downed man on a battleship, smiling. I can never tell who the man is, but I can tell that he has no arms or legs. And the Chancellor's eyes are colder than Hoth. It's disquieting."

"You must remember that some visions pass in time," Obi-Wan cautions, experiencing even as he says it the familiar sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that had saved Qui-Gon and Anakin's lives many times over. Has he not seen visions himself that turned out, in one way or another, to be premonitory? Hadn't the Force itself agreed with Master Yoda in the Council chamber? Qui-Gon's most frequent admonition to him had been to keep his mind in _the present—the Living Force flows in_ this _moment, Obi-Wan, while the future the Unifying Force is showing you with the Duchess will only be possible should you decide to leave the Order. I trust you will center yourself—_

Obi-Wan blinks the remembered voice away, focusing on Lana. He will think about how he had begun to forget the sound of Qui-Gon in meditation _later._

Lana, in the present, in the here and now, shakes her head. Her braid sways with the motion and the beads jangle against each other, a legacy of another kind. "I wish they would, Master, but Master Yoda counseled me to trust them. I know thinking ill of the Chancellor is perhaps unwarranted, given the unfortunate nature of his passing—"

"No," Obi-Wan says slowly, resting his chin on his hand. There are many things that lead him to speak up—not only his own personal suspicions, but the wealth of evidence that most on the Council had not exactly wanted to see. _Perhaps he came upon the Dark artifacts without knowing,_ indeed. His colleagues are indomitable, but if the galaxy could see the kind of squabbling that goes on in the Council chamber, the austere image outsiders seem to have of the Jedi would collapse in an instant. "No, perhaps it isn't."

Lana holds her breath for a moment, meeting his eyes, and a silent understanding passes between them in the cool 'cycled air of the room. "The artifacts," she says, ignoring the buzzing datapad at her hip in favor of taking a sip of tea.

"The artifacts," Obi-Wan agrees.

She hesitates a moment longer. Her datapad continues buzzing.

"Yes, Padawan Ruhr?" Obi-Wan asks, eyebrows arched when some internal war continues to wage itself on her features in real time.

"…Master Vos ought to be back soon, since Hutt Space is officially a no man's land," she volunteers instead of whatever it was she had been planning on saying. A tad disingenuous of her, but then, she's technically only under his jurisdiction for the length of their investigation. She glances at her datapad with a frown, taps it, and looks back at him. "A few of the Archivists told me that he's been investigating reports of Sith artifacts in the Outer Rim. Perhaps he may be able to identify some of the things that the Archives didn't have?"

 _A hermit indeed, Lana Viszka Ruhr,_ Obi-Wan thinks. He considers it. Quinlan is a pain to deal with at the best of times, but he's undeniably effective at what he does. He and Aayla had been a remarkable team before he'd gone under deep cover at the beginning of the war—while the Council and many of the more conservative members of the Order tend to side-eye both his personality and his actions, grumbling about how dangerously close he tends to toe the line, they've hardly been able to argue with his results. But if his latest report (made to Depa over a grainy-sounding com call, low and urgent) is any indication, it may be a while yet before he's able to extract himself from his latest mission.

Realizing he's been staring at the wall, he returns his attention to Lana, whose hands rest lightly on her braid. "Indeed, but it may be a while yet. It will take us some time to investigate all the physical evidence—let us focus on the here and now, not our anxieties. We won't disregard them," he adds firmly when Lana's face falls. "Master Yoda himself vouched for your visions, Padawan. But a Jedi does not allow circumstance to paralyze them. We are to act in serenity, that we might become better attuned to the Force itself."

"Yes, Master," Lana murmurs, not entirely in disagreement. Obi-Wan lets it pass.

While it is the duty of the Padawan to follow orders, long experience with an entirely uncommon student has taught him that the unquestioning obedience that was expected of his generation of Padawans is not necessarily the wisest course of action for this new generation, what with bearing not only a war that never should've happened on their shoulders, but also the heavy weight of military laurels. The chaos so omnipresent in the galaxy seems senseless enough that it is far more natural to question, to ask _why,_ than it is to continue on in the same vein, expecting peace to last forever.

Besides, she isn't his Padawan. It is something of a gaffe to take over the training of a Padawan whose Master has died if there is a closer claimant to the responsibility active in the Order—and Feemor qualifies, being her grandmaster. Stuck on Ilum or no, he'd have to give permission to any potential Master seeking to guide Lana to Knighthood. Until the man can leave, Lana is essentially stuck in stasis.

Obi-Wan very carefully does not acknowledge the part of him that has very much begun to tire of the Order's traditions. He is a Jedi Knight, and a General besides; he has a duty to Republic, and to the galaxy itself.

A duty that, at the moment, involves bringing peace _back_ to the galaxy. Not throwing it further into disorder.

Every Jedi carries a legacy with them, in some ways. It just so happens that he carries Qui-Gon's, and whatever Count Dooku is now, he was once Qui-Gon's Master.

 _Sins of our forefathers,_ he thinks, recalling a long, rambling legend of sand and suns and sons that Anakin had once told him before bed in those earliest days when he was tormented by the loss of kin and familiarity. Those who think that a Jedi has no home know so terribly little about the depths of their way of life. _Sins of our sons._

* * *

 **Meg vaabir gar - Mando'a. Literally "What do you [mean?]".**

 **ad'ika - Mando'a. "little one, son, daughter, of any age"**

 **me'sen'ika-iviin - Mando'a. Composite. Literally "little speed-ship". Childish way of referring to a speeder.**

 **can'gal - Mando'a. "starfighter"**

 **Bic's kandosii'la - Mando'a. Literally "it's stunning/it's amazing"; expression of awe.**

 **vod - Mando'a. Universal (no specific gender delineation). "1. Brother, 2. Comrade/friend, 3. Sister"**

 **On double negatives: grammatically incorrect in English, yes, but a quintessentially Mando way to stress something of deep importance. All double negatives in Lana's narrative are intentional.**

 **Mostly sourced from the Mando'a dictionary.**


	6. Chapter 6

"We need a pilot," she'd said.

Daud ambles along the edges of the Jedi Temple hangar bay, absently pushing his hair out of his eyes as he mulls Lana's words over. After the week he's had, he supposes he shouldn't be surprised that his life is changing so quickly—it's almost like fate, or the universe, or perhaps even the Force that the Jedi so ardently believe in. Fulcrum jumping in right before the Umbaran woman to block that lunge for his leg was downright serendipitous. But a job? With the Jedi?

His grandmother back on Naboo would be awed. She is old, and how old nobody is quite certain. She remembers the age of the Republic when Jedi Masters wandered the galaxy, helping those whom the Force guided them to; she remembers a time before the Jedi were warriors, a time when they were monks, a time they were more closely bonded to the thrumming web connecting stars and planets together.

Him, well, he'd never been quite sure what to make of all of it. He's had times in his life where he shouldn't have gotten out of the situations he'd been in—that time with the dianoga in the sea near his childhood home stands out—but it'd been easy to brush it all off as luck, at least until this week had upended his world on its head.

He fiddles with one of the particularly long curls that grace his shoulders, stopping to watch one of the hangar pilots converse with a tall avian Jedi. He's too far off to hear what they're saying, but the woman is gesturing animatedly at her ship while the Jedi nods, demeanor more pleased than not. They seem almost happy, as much as anyone in the Temple can be with the grimness of war hanging over the very walls of their sacred home.

 _Alright,_ he thinks. _Alright. I could get used to this. Chances like this, they don't just fall into your lap every day, now do they?_

" _We choose what we make of ourselves,"_ his little sister would say—or at least, he imagines she would. She's been wandering Naboo nearly from the moment she came of age, though she always stays with their parents for the Festival of Light. _"I think we're given the tools to do so, at least. Not always. But sometimes, you just know when possibility comes knocking."_

Daud smiles to himself. She always was the most philosophical of Antema family; she wouldn't be out of place with the Jedi, really, but she's far better suited to her unfettered adventures than a life constrained by something like the Code.

Which brings him back to this: he's been offered a job, he's got payments to make, and he is a dutiful son, if nothing else.

"I'll do it," he says to himself, looking out over the vast expanse of the Temple hangar bay, the long rows of ships and the speeder pen on the left, a sea of Jedi and mechanics and pilots all weaving their way through a world that smells like oil, repulsolift exhaust, and the galaxy full of life above it all. He feels at peace, like something in him has been waiting to come here for a long time—been waiting to come home. The thought feels right, settles into his mind and stays, and he nods. "I can do it."

He blinks and looks away, back to the door he'd come in through. Lana stands in it, her short, wavy hair framing her face, almost like a blond halo thanks to all the light coming from behind her. Her eyes, he realizes as he stares at her, are very nearly the same shade of sea-green as Master Kenobi's—they have the same expression, too, ancient and timeless and weary at once. It's almost like they reflect the stars. There's a peculiar look on her face as her gaze lands on him and her hand strays to curl lightly around her Padawan braid, and as he goes to meet her he has the funniest feeling that she already knows what he's going to say.

* * *

 _I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me,_ Lana tells herself, sitting back and staring at the readout the Archive terminal is displaying—a feed covering all the new stories from the major Republic news outlets. A feed that is suspiciously quiet about not only Jedi actions, but the investigation into the Supreme Chancellor's death.

"Is something the matter, Padawan Ruhr?" Jocasta Nu's arch tone makes Lana jump and turn in her seat. With a frown that is only half as disapproving as it should be, Jocasta leans in and scans Lana's terminal. "Nothing appears to be amiss."

"That is the issue, Master. They're too quiet. The Galactic Enquirer is talking about Hutt Space—but there's nothing about why it closed itself off, only speculation as to how it will affect the war. And the other outlets are hardly bothering to investigate the way they would if, say, another Senatorial scandal had been unveiled. They're propping up stories of nerfherders on Corellia making inroads to start nerf rights conventions and covering minor trade treaties between Republic-aligned planets. The Ring of Kafrene is saucier than this—" At the look on Jocasta's face, Lana abruptly shuts her mouth, face burning.

In a move that one probably could've seen coming from space, the older woman gives her a severe frown. "We do not wish for galactic events to be _saucier_ , as you put it, merely to satisfy our _desire_ to be knowledgeable."

"No, Master. Yes, Master," Lana mutters.

"Meditate on the nature of your complaint, Padawan Ruhr, and consider from whence it might come," Jocasta suggests, in the fashion Masters tend to when they are issuing an order. "I will not ask how you know about the Ring of Kafrene, but you _will_ explain yourself to Master Kenobi posthaste, as you are working alongside him for the duration of your investigation."

Lana fights to keep her expression even. "Yes, Master."

"And as you seem to be inciting my Archivists to become amateur spelunkers in their spare time, I will thank you to refrain from encouraging them to abandon their posts and venture into the depths of the Temple. We rarely use the lower levels in this age for a reason, Padawan. They are far too dangerous for anyone less than a Battlemaster," Jocasta adds, sternly.

Very carefully, Lana does not sigh. "Yes, Master."

"I believe your time at the terminals is up. May the Force be with you, Padawan." Jocasta watches as she disengages and logs off of the terminal; only when she stands does Jocasta nod at her and stride away, intent on pouncing—or perhaps swooping—onto poor Knight Olin, who's staring haplessly at the data stacks with a flimsiplast note in his hand.

"And also with you," Lana mutters, glad that Jocasta is far enough away that her impertinence cannot be heard and thus engender a further punishment. Being a Masterless Padawan can be an absolute boor at times, something Lana hasn't helped by virtue of remaining something of a hermit, but at least she's gotten the information she actually needed. She fiddles with her datapad as she leaves, ignoring the fleeting looks of pity from passing Knights and Masters as she shuffles through the halls like a technician with an addiction to ko-rock techno punk.

Most of her fellow Jedi seem to assume that she relives the day her Master died every night, and pass her eccentricity off as the fallout from the breaking of a Force bond that had been stronger than most. Not so with those like Master Yoda or Mar-Suu, who understand the intricacies of past, present, and future; that she sees the past in the future and the present in the past and the future in everything in-between is not nearly so alarming to those who have seen stranger things than Lana while walking the path of fidelity to the Force.

"Jocasta never changes," Qui-Gon Jinn observes from somewhere to her left, sounding downright _pleased_ by this. Lana does not respond. "Neither do your reading habits, it seems. Yavin IV, Padawan?"

 _I had a feeling,_ she says, directing the tendril of thought in his general direction. It's hard to try and pinpoint it to a specific person when that person is so integrated with the Force that they might as well be the Force itself, a particular facet that every ghost she's met seems to be well aware of—and of course they are, being connected to everything within the Force. It's very nearly cheating, is what it is. Not that they've ever asked her opinion on the matter.

"A feeling that led you to disobey a direct order from Master Yoda."

Lana winces, but ever since he's taken to accompanying her in her meanderings through the Temple, Qui-Gon has proven to be even more to-the-point than Yoda. A product of the lineage, she supposes. The precious little she has heard about Count Dooku seems to match the pattern, as did her Master's description of Feemor Gard; Obi-Wan is an anomaly, but she hasn't disregarded the possibility that he's in the same vein as his Master and his Master's Master quite yet. He did teach Anakin Skywalker, infamous among her crop of Padawans for calling one of the newborns brought to the creche "more wrinkled than old Jira's pallies," something they'd all learned was a Tatooinian fruit after his public apology to a very amused Ali-Alaan.

Qui-Gon hums. "Well, Padawan. Perhaps you will find more enlightenment in explaining yourself to Obi-Wan—it is often in correction that we are better able to see the cause of our troubles."

 _Perhaps, Master,_ Lana agrees, the picture of bland acquiescence. Qui-Gon gives her a quelling look, the kind of expression that says _I have the high ground, don't try it._

"Lana."

Lana half-turns, recognizing the deep voice instinctively. She blinks. "Hiram?"

Hiram smiles, solemn even in gladness, and gives her a light bow as best he can. His feathers are a light shade of orange, and the scar he now bears across his forehead looks pale, a faded thing. She can even see more of his feathers beginning to grow back around the edges. "It is good to see you, Lana."

"And you as well," Lana returns, genuinely happy to see her Fosh crechemate—the only friend she'd ever managed to make and keep, at least in the Temple. "You look—well, rather recovered from your Knighting, my friend."

"It was a near thing," Hiram agrees. He falls into step with her as naturally as if he'd been with her the whole time. "But the Force was with me, and by its grace I have returned home."

"I'm glad. I heard the news, but there was nothing I could do. For the first time in an age, I have been caught up here." Lana tucks her hands into her oversized robes, glancing out at the regulated rain cycle as it begins to fall on Coruscant. _Blasted weather system is going to break again soon,_ she judges with a frown. _Who do they pay to maintain it?_

"Oh?"

She shifts her gaze from the window to Hiram. "I have been made part of the team investigating the Supreme Chancellor's death. Master Yoda said it was my visions—he believes they're important to the matter."

Hiram takes a moment to digest this. "I see," he says, turning his feathers a thoughtful shade with a shake of his head. "It began all those years ago, and now, as a tree ripens after many long seasons of growth, it is coming to fruition."

"I saw you on Jakku, Hiram. I had come to tell you, but Master Yoda counseled me not to." She frowns at the scar on his forehead. "It was the will of the Force, but you were still hurt."

"So must some things be, though the pain was rather unpleasant," he agrees, his talon-tipped fingers drifting across the scar.

"I apologize."

He glances at her, a motion that puts him in profile, beak as sharp as ever. His whiskers quiver. "For the will of the Force?"

"No," Lana says, the amusement in his voice turning hers peevish. "No, I meant for knowing what would be and remaining silent."

"You see many things, I know. I have never begrudged you your knowledge, Lana. We all bear different burdens. I cannot say I would not have liked to know, but the Force had a lesson for me in my experience. Had I known, there is no guarantee I would have gone regardless." Hiram nods, a strange, jerky motion, the most birdlike thing she's ever seen him do.

Lana hums.

"You disagree? Perhaps we ought to meditate together," he suggests. "I will show you my truth. I will show you Jakku, even."

"Nothing good ever happens on a desert planet," she says mournfully.

His feathers rustle—or, really, he rustles his feathers on purpose, the motion that shows her that he means it, as much as any word he's ever spoken. "Then let my example be the first to change your mind, my friend. For all that was difficult, the Force guided me to something that was beautiful."

"Shared meditation is vital for a Jedi," Qui-Gon puts in as Lana mulls Hiram's offer over. His presence, slight as it is, has remained with her; if he intends to go with her, it will be a task to explain his role to Obi-Wan. Mostly, the old Master just seems to enjoy watching her misadventures. "When we begin to hide our secrets from one another, that is when we fail as an Order."

She feels the way the blood drains from her face as the full implications of her haunter's words hit her. _No_ , something in her shouts, a knee-jerk reaction, but something in the way Hiram tilts his head to look at her stays her admittedly quick tongue. This is Hiram, her crechemate, who never treated her as something less than herself. She swallows the refusal down. "If you've a time, then by all means, Hiram. I _am_ willing."

"It is difficult for you, I know," Hiram murmurs, but his feathers are grey and tinged white at the edges—he can't fool her. He's relieved. The offer wasn't only for her benefit, she realizes.

Lana breathes out, feeling as if for once, she's made the right choice. It is a rare thing even among the Jedi for one's actions to be absolute in moral distinctions; while there is a path, she has had to face the fact that the paragons of Force-adherence don't even know what they're doing half the time. Just like everyone else in the galaxy. "Master Keera would have wanted me to live on, and live well. It's fine."

" _Nu kyr'adyc, shi taab'echaajla,"_ Hiram tries to sound out, stumbling over the pronunciation. After a moment, he shakes his head. "Forgive me. It is beyond my beak."

"It was a fair attempt. _Merely marching far away_ —yes. Yes, that's what it's like." Lana grins. "She would've liked Mandalore, I think."

"Indeed. She was an excellent duelist."

"Some of us, on the other hand…"

"When _I_ can best you, Lana, you cannot attribute it to poor natural aptitude. Tell me, how is your Soresu?"

"I'll have you know—"

They continue their quiet conversation through the paths they know as well as their hearbeats until Lana's route diverges at the turbolift next to the salles; Hiram tilts his head, giving her a considering look, but he only wishes the Force's continued presence in her life. Then it is Lana, alone, heading to the hangar bay to check on how Daud is settling into the quarters for Temple pilots before she meets Obi-Wan in the Room of a Thousand Fountains.

"Tell me, Padawan Ruhr, what was your pilot's name again?" Qui-Gon asks, polite as ever.

"Daud," she responds absently, thoughts already bent on destiny and deserts, on the tapestry of fate and the vagaries within it. "Daud Antema."

* * *

Obi-Wan is standing at the edge of the fountain basin, one arm crossed, supporting the hand that he's grasping his chin with. His brows are furrowed; his eyes are very far away, moreso than is warranted by any use of the Force. Lana casually lets one foot land on a particularly brittle-looking twig fallen from the bushes nearby. Sure enough, Obi-Wan tenses at the sound. He turns around with a light smile on his face that fools neither of them. Whatever he's been contemplating has put the ages of the galaxy in his eyes, and that's not something you can just hide. "Padawan Ruhr."

"Master Kenobi," Lana says, wishing for Qui-Gon's serene mien right about this moment. The blasted man had vanished halfway through her chat with Daud, and it doesn't seem like he's going to return and grant it to her. Lacking his soothing presence, she instead settles for drifting to Obi-Wan's side and fixing her eyes on the water. "Ever heard the one about the Knights who made planetfall on Sholon?"

"No," Obi-Wan says, bemused. He knows of Sholon, as most do—an unfortunate byproduct of having been made to take the Advanced Geography courses as a Senior Padawan. Sholon is an uninhabited snowy planet with no significant natural resources, home mostly to forests, mountains, and an unattractive sea composed of sulfuric acid. There is little of interest there, even though it resides within Republic space, parsecs away from the Corellian Trade Spine.

Lana's lips twitch despite herself. "They say they made an ice landing."

Utter silence.

"That was awful," Obi-Wan sighs. She glances over; he's pinched the bridge of his nose, the smile a little less reluctant, a little more real. "You're of the Muln school of punnery, I see."

"I've a certificate and everything," she says, virtuous and earnest, and the horrified expression on his face brings a full-blown smile to hers.

"I'm glad you don't. With my luck, I'd have to be the one to punish him," he mutters.

Lana shrugs. "I am an eternal student."

Obi-Wan cuts her a look, knowing the finishing statement— _and a servant of the Force_. Lana smiles winningly. His eyebrows raise. "Impertinence does not become an _eternal student."_

"Yes, Master Nu said much the same," she admits, tugging on her braid. "I made an ill-advised comment in her presence, and now I am to explain myself to you as penance."

"And are you to do anything else as penance?" he asks. There is a touch of an arch kind of drollness in his voice that has her fighting another smile. "If so, you had best get it all out now."

"I am to _stop inciting Master Nu's archivists to become amateur spelunkers,"_ Lana says with as straight a face as she can manage; the task is made rather more difficult by Obi-Wan raising an incredulous brow. "I'm afraid it's a long story, Master Kenobi. I can write it up and add it to our documentation—"

"No, that won't be necessary. Let's hear what this _explaining yourself_ business is all about," he says, looking very torn between curiosity and the uniquely long-suffering patience that only comes by raising a remarkably difficult Padawan.

She nods. "The whole debacle about Hutt Space has been bothering me, so I was doing some research. Unfortunately, there was very little on the major news outlets about it—strange, considering that it's the next big movement in the war. The only thing I could find was an unsubstantiated claim that the Hutts have only been letting neutral parties through. Word on the Net is that there'll be an expose soon, though. Rogue One has been quiet for a few weeks. Quiet enough to make people think there'll be a leak soon. Master Nu happened to find me marveling over the lack of activity, and, well, I said the Ring of Kafrene was saucier than the news."

Obi-Wan considers this long-winded stream of information for a moment. Then he starts toward the path, waving for her to follow. His gait is becoming less stumpy and more something approaching his usual elegance; while the brace remains, it's a fair bet that it'll be off soon. "Elaborate on the way, if you must, about how you know of an obscure trading post unlisted in the Archives," he says. "We'll be checking the Chancellor's apartment today, and it will be the first time it's been opened since the Chancellor's passing. I'd like us both to be alert and aware."

* * *

 **Nu kyr'adc, shi taab'echaaj'la - Mando'a. "Not gone, merely marching far away." (Tribute to a dead comrade.)**

 **Sourced from the Mando'a dictionary.**


	7. Chapter 7

"I take back what I said about humility," Lana mutters when they walk in the door of the Chancellor's apartment. Directly in the line of sight of the entrance, on the far wall, is a massive gilded portrait of Palpatine, a fatherly mien on his face. Something in her feels cold at the sight; she puts it aside when Obi-Wan walks a few steps forward. He stops just before the opulent rug on the ground, boots two inches away from touching it.

"The Force," he says briskly at her confused silence, crossing his arms. "Something's—strange."

Lana frowns. It takes a bit of effort to concentrate in here. This high up, all the sensations from below well up like spurts of water gushing out of the ground; if there's anything to be sensed, it's something she needs to look for. She closes her eyes and reaches out. The energy of Coruscant reaches for her in return, but she shies away, trying to narrow in her focus on the Chancellor's apartment. Her brows furrow. "There's something..."

"It's the rug," Obi-Wan says, and she hears him take a few steps back. She opens her eyes and sees him eyeing the rug as if it's Sithspawn waiting to strike. The more she looks at it, the more she thinks it nearly could be. It echoes with the remembrance of the life its materials once held, plants weaving and waving under an unknown sun, but under that... "I've got a bad feeling about this."

"Noted. Bad feeling," Lana says lightly, pulling out her datapad and jotting the sensation down. "How shall we proceed, Master Kenobi?"

Obi-Wan gives her a dry look. "Very carefully. We do only have three hours."

* * *

"Ah, look. The Chancellor had his own personal computer mainframe."

"Let me check it."

"Of course, Master."

"My _word._ What kind of encryption is this?"

"May I see, Master?"

"Well, it doesn't appear to be booby-trapped, unlike nearly everything else in this room. Go ahead."

"Hmm... looks like it's a derivative of a biohexacryption—needs a series of passwords inputted in a timeframe, liable to trigger security measures if failed too many times, and the passwords change every hour. Fascinating. This sort of thing has been mostly theoretical, did you know—"

"I'm beginning to understand what Master Nu meant when she called you a headache."

"Did you say something, Master?"

"Nothing at all. If it'll trigger security measures, I can't say I fancy trying to access the data this very moment. If we had the luxury of calling in a code-breaker..."

A polite cough. "You know, Master..."

"Don't tell me."

"...Master Tholme taught my crop of Padawans rather a lot of things..."

"Of course he did," Obi-Wan mutters under his breath.

"...and there's a chance I might be able to break through the encryption."

"The _mostly theoretical_ encryption?"

"Yes, Master." Lana remains deferent, but there's a strength in the line of her shoulders and the set of her jaw that speaks to the confidence underlying her words. Obi-Wan raises an eyebrow at her. She lifts her chin. "I've kept the skill up."

"You do know that this is the Chancellor's personal computer," Obi-Wan says, shifting when his leg throbs under the pressure of standing in one place for too long.

Lana nods. The reminder, it seems, affects her not at all.

 _Stars,_ he thinks, feeling a very familiar, very _Anakin_ headache coming on. "The very same Chancellor whose hobbies seem to have been not only derivative, to say the least, but actively dangerous to anyone within a fifteen-mile radius."

"Indeed," she replies, tucking her arms into her robes as if she's being perfectly reasonable. "I wouldn't be breaking all the way in, Master, not far enough to uncover anything truly sensitive, anyways. That would probably make unpleasant things happen. But I could get us far enough to see what he kept on here. If there's anything at all that could give us a lead as to what he was doing with those artifacts..."

He raises his eyebrows. "I'd rather think that would fall under _truly sensitive_ , Padawan."

"Not if it were being hidden in plain sight," she replies, and something about her absolute certainty makes him pause and look at her for a long moment, as he has so often found himself doing since he began to work with her. If she were a younger Padawan, as Anakin had been when he got into these moods most often, he would be tempted to attribute her conviction to arrogance alone. It is often a Jedi failing. To have access to the Force and all the power it grants—it is heady and intoxicating, filling the less wary with a kind of delirious drunkeness based off of the feeling of false security that comes about by being able to touch the very warp and weft of the universe and make it malleable to your will.

That is why the Jedi endeavor to inform the parents of every youngling on the Temple's kyber memory crystal of both the risks and the benefits of sending their children to become Jedi. Not only does the life of a Jedi require continual sacrifice in order to stay on the straight and narrow, it is equivalent to willingly putting oneself in a crucible again and again, giving up the natural sentient inclination to accumulate power in order to better act as a steward to the will of the Force. Selflessness and humility are demanded of a Jedi not to put them above others, as some in the Order have grown to think, but to keep them on the path—to guide them away from forgetting their own fragility.

To be a Jedi is to sacrifice all to the Force: the self, the body, the blade, everything. Rare is the Jedi that would consider walking with the Light the easier path.

Though Lana notably struggles with letting the Force guide her 'saber, she is amongst the breed of Padawans that carry an ardent, uncanny faith in the purpose of the Force in every possibility it presents to them—the kind that so often dwell in hope for the prevailing endurance of the Light, and less often that which is before you. Obi-Wan would have likely leaned more toward her viewpoint had he not had a Master who pushed him to both think and act in the moment; as it is, with the experience of both time and suffering, he has come to a realization that there must be a balance between one's hopes and one's actions.

Just as there must be balance in the heart of a Jedi. He shifts again and ignores the fresh spurt of pain that shoots up his leg. "You saw something?"

"I believe so." The tense line of her shoulders relaxes at his failure to immediately discredit her proposed plan. "It... isn't what I would've chosen, Master, but many things I see seem to point back to something to do with him. Whatever he was hiding—I think it was big."

"And you want to find out what it was," he says, less a question, more a statement.

Her sea-green eyes flicker to the console of the computer and back to him, and for a moment he sees fire in her gaze, sees her face lit from behind by unearthly light. But she shrugs, at odds with the flash of ferocity he'd borne witness to, and the moment passes. "When the Force leads, what else can I do but follow?"

 _What indeed,_ Obi-Wan wonders, eyeing her with weariness. He's getting too old to keep up with the children these days. Not that Anakin has ever listened to his reservations—it's nice that Lana at least puts up the appearance of consideration. "Well, then. A calculated risk it is."

"I won't disappoint you, Master," Lana says, relief rippling in the Force, clear as day. Strange, considering he knows she's been working on her shields.

Strange, unless...

Obi-Wan closes his eyes and reaches for the Force as Lana sits at the console and begins typing, a rapid pitter-patter of fingers against the keys. With unexpected speed and depth, the world falls away; what remains is the universe, a tapestry of divine threads balanced on the sharp tip of a keen knife, ready to tumble over given the slightest provocation. The thread that is himself looks and sees a million different fractures occurring across space and time, sees the galaxy, sees the rise and fall of the ages, sees supernovas and voiceless things, sees life in it all and through it all.

He pulls back, treads in the endless sea that is the Force, bewildered at the breadth of this on Coruscant of all places. He did not intend to go this deep.

 _Look,_ the voice that has been with him from his earliest days croons. _Listen._

To the Force, they are all but children, but servants. Obi-Wan can do naught but obey; he looks and he listens, one blazing life among trillions, and in the murmur of the inumerable voices presented to him, one begins to repeat itself—faint at first, but it grows louder and louder, echoing with the chorus of a hundred, maybe two hundred sentients.

Into the galaxy steps a brown-haired mercenary woman with eyes that burn with the same fire that had peeked out of Lana's. She stares at him, stares into him, and when she opens her mouth the universe draws a breath with her.

" _Rebellions are built on hope,"_ she tells him, and Lana is tugging at his sleeve in the late afternoon in the apartments of the former Supreme Chancellor, her hands unsteady with an anxiety he'd previously only suspected her to possess.

"Master Kenobi? Master?" Lana is asking; the moment he moves she lets go, steps back, and lifts her chin to regain some measure of poise. "Are you quite alright, Master?"

"Perfectly fine, Padawan Ruhr. Only a vision," he reassures her with a faint smile. "I have them as well. Have you finished with your task?"

She waves a datachip in the air and nimbly slots it into her personal datapad. "I was able to get several docs onto this without triggering anything. They've got some additional layers of security on them, but deciphering them will be an easy enough task. I noticed on the computer's chron that our time is almost up...?"

Obi-Wan glances at the innocuous holo-clock projected just above the wall-length windows. Sure enough, they've been present for at least two and a half standard hours; the guard shift will change soon, and they had been told in no uncertain terms to finish up their data collection by then. Being a Jedi does not gain one much favor these days, at least not in the Legislative District, and it had taken some spirited negotiation (that he had carefully left Lana behind for) to gain access to the Chancellor's apartments—a power play on the part of the Senators he had ended up needing to speak with.

Political bureaucracy in the Galactic City, in Obi-Wan's esteemed opinion, is for droids. Other star systems, usually being possessed of some measure of respect for the art of meaningful rhetoric, are entirely different matters.

"With this," Lana is saying, "we should have plenty to assemble a preliminary report based on physical evidence. That's what the courts like, anyways, going by their refusal to acknowledge the holovid of the Jafan statue incident."

"Indeed we should. Though this is going to the Senate, not the courts," he reminds her, not for the first time.

She nods. "Right, my mistake. Shall we go, Master? I don't trust the computer not to have a time-delayed failsafe."

"What did you _do?"_ Obi-Wan half-asks, half-demands at the too-casual tone in her voice as she follows him out the room.

"Oh, a bit of this, a bit of that..."

" _Padawan."_

"Nothing _really,_ Master Kenobi, please do believe me."

"Somehow, I'm far from reassured."

* * *

A moment in time, or perhaps a living memory, reverberating in the Force:

The thing about Anakin Skywalker is that he is unerringly, blisteringly human; you can't be around the man for more than five minutes and walk away thinking of him as unpersonable. He is young and winsome, charming in his warmth, so unlike a Jedi.

("So why is he one?"—nobody quite dares to ask.)

Anakin Skywalker is exactly what the galaxy needs. He is their human warrior, their rallying cry, the face of the Republic. He does not fight only for the impersonal ideals of glory and liberty—he fights for something more, something raw, something visceral. He fights to protect his children. He fights for his wife, the strong, beautiful Senator Amidala, the former Queen of Naboo, fights to give her the safety she needs to do what she loves.

Enabling the system, some would say. They are not entirely wrong.

This is why, when he is sitting in the command tent of a makeshift camp on Jakku with the 501st, wondering why under the suns Count Dooku would've been sighted skulking about this nowhere planet of sand and bleached rock and dead things and why the Council thinks it's of such importance that they ordered him away from the front lines, he takes the datapad Captain Rex hands him, reads the document opened on it, and carefully sets it down on the rickety table they'd scavenged from a scrap heap. His face could be carved out of stone for all the emotion he shows.

"Sir?" Rex ventures. When the tent begins to vibrate, he looks around uneasily. Perhaps including his account of getting his inhibitor chip taken out had been a mistake.

"We're fixing this," Anakin says, the glare he directs at the sand below their feet burning like the twin suns of Tatooine. He hadn't wanted to believe Fives when this had come up before, but the Chancellor was alive then, and things have been changing rapidly since the man's death. Rex can sympathize. It's something, to learn that everything you thought you knew had a flawed edge to it somewhere. "We're fixing this, and we're fixing it now."

"You'll need a plan," Rex points out, not willing to let on how unsettling the contents of his dead _vod's_ journal had been for him. The years of agonizing over whether it'd been true or not, the decision to believe a man who is, by now, long gone—all of that was a uniquely transformative journey, one he's still not sure will end in any kind of positive outcome. Not for him and his brothers, at least. Until he can be sure, that means there are things he just can't share with the upper management.

But with this... This is different. This is new. This is leagues beyond the turret-lined fortress wall that the General had previously tended to spontaneously manifest whenever anyone looked to be gearing up to cast doubt on the Chancellor.

Anakin turns to him, a proud man, and Rex can see the desert in his eyes. "I'll do whatever it takes, Rex. Nobody deserves that. It's like—it _is_ an inhibitor. Serve well and serve proudly—but you should have a _choice._ Everyone should. You removed the chip, didn't you? There has to be a way to make this work."

It is then, looking at the helpless pain etched into the face of one of the most powerful men in the Republic, pain they have seen in millions of different eyes during the course of countless liberation campaigns in the Outer Rim, that Rex begins to understand something: Anakin Skywalker is many things, but he was born a slave.

Rex could think of many arguments in this moment, ones for duty, ones for loyalty. They both know what it is to be devoted to the cause; he won't do his General the disservice of questioning his perception of a _vod's_ devotion. Not while the sand is quaking and the tent poles are vibrating and their _jetii_ is shaking and all too human. Instead, he slowly, cautiously puts a hand on Anakin's shoulder. "General," he says. Anakin looks up at him, a horrible nothingness in his gaze, the kind of blankness that comes with too much emotion. Stars, but the man is young. They all are. It's something he tries not to think about. "As your captain, let me point something out. You need _mirjahaal_ —peace of mind, processing time—to make any kind of plan of the scale we'll need effective. Maybe talk to your wife, or—do _jetii_ stuff. I'll speak with my brothers. Not all of us will agree, but I do."

"This place dampens the Force," Anakin mutters, half to himself, standing. He's taken to verbalizing his thought process more frequently since General Kenobi got stuck on forced medical leave. Rex knows better by now than to attempt a response. "That's out. Com call, then. I'll have to use some parts to rig up a scrambler... I'll bet Luke would _love_ that, wouldn't he... Right. Later." Crossing his arms, he turns to Rex. "Get on it, Captain. I want you back in this tent by the time the sun meets those far dunes."

"Understood, General."

* * *

 **Been a bit of a week.**

 **Be good to those who would call you _vod._**

 **jetii - Mando'a. Mando term for "Jedi".**

 **Sourced from the Mando'a dictionary.**


	8. Chapter 8

A comcall:

"Daud?"

"Lana. What can I do for you?"

"I have some further questions for you—about your testimony. And a follow-up on the draigon thing you mentioned. When are you off-duty?"

"Well... I don't know if you've noticed, but it's the graveyard shift. Right now. And I'm on it."

A pause. Daud quirks an eyebrow, bemused at Lana's sudden silence.

"...I see."

A longer pause. _Maybe she isn't used to asking for things,_ he thinks, his second eyebrow joining the first as he realizes it'll be his job to break the silence.

"Would you like to come down to the hangar bay?"

"I suppose I haven't seen your new ship yet..."

Yes, that's relief in her tone. Daud shakes his head. "I'll take that as a yes."

* * *

Hiram's feathers are coated in golden dust when Lana finally takes a break from assembling the report to wander out into the Temple at wide. She finds him in the younglings' planetarium, sitting peacefully against one of the walls, eyes on the projected stars above them. He glances at her, a sideways motion. "You came."

"You're covered in glitter," Lana murmurs, quiet out of respect for the tenuous serenity in his signature. She settles next to him. That he chose this newer planetarium instead of the larger, more sophisticated one near the heart of the Temple was no mistake. Here was where they had first met, a little girl fresh from Mandalore and a crying chick with soft feathers, both suffering nightmares, both looking for something they couldn't explain.

He nods. "It was arts and crafts time."

"The dust is like the Force," she remembers, a small, wan smile on her face. "...Everywhere, it gets."

Hiram's laughter has always been an odd thing, a harsh cackle, at odds with the gentle currents of his demeanor. His feathers rustle and his chest vibrates with the force of trying to hold it back; Lana awkwardly stamps her foot on the ground, a thoroughly lackluster imitation of Yoda's cane, and he caws loudly—too loudly. A passing Knight glances at them from the entrance. She watches him reel it back in, his shoulders shaking, and she smiles at him.

"They used the same lesson," he says when he can speak again. "Little Nawah was mouthing it behind Ali-Alaan's back as he spoke. She ended up meditating instead of playing alongside the others."

Nawah is bright like the sun and just as impetuous. Lana's smile turns real, oddly smaller, a quirk of the lips more than anything. "She'll learn patience yet."

"Sooner would be better than later," he jokes, and when she only keeps smiling, he grows serious, meeting her eyes. "Lana..."

"Show me," she murmurs, steeling herself.

Hiram studies her. Her lips thin at the doubt underlining the way he tilts his head—perhaps he thinks her reluctant, perhaps he wonders if it is the memory of her Master's passing, of the bond snapping, that makes her shy away—but when she opens her mouth he shakes his head. "The past is the past," he says, almost more to himself.

He faces her, and she him. They observe each other in silence, the passage of the years etched into her face, his feathers, the shape of her jaw and the weathered ridge of his now-scarred forehead.

 _Vod,_ Lana thinks to herself. _Be good to those who will call you vod._

The first breath in a shared meditation is long and slow, half an exhalation, releasing the worries of the present into the Force. Then the second is careful, with the eyes closed, the heart reaching for the Force, reaching for your _vod._ They never explained it to her in so many words, but that's what it is, a truth she carries under her breastbone—Jedi have _vod_ like those of Mandalore, whether they like acknowledging it or not. Hiram meets her in the middle, a gentle light—

As one, they draw in the third breath. The universe falls away under their feet.

Lana opens her eyes to sand and displaced battleships.

* * *

"You know it was my task to follow the reports of a Confederate presence here," Hiram says next to her, drawing his hood down. They stand in the shadow of a fallen armored transportation unit, half-buried by the sands, and Lana breathes in the scent of sun-baked sand and metal. "I had an additional task, the one the Council put me on the mission for: meet with the brethren of the Adherency and ascertain whether the sensitives among them had sensed a disturbance in the Force."

He'd been looking at going into Diplomacy, before the war. Master Bar'qo had wanted him to. Something in his posture—the way his shoulders are tense, perhaps, or the mottled grey of his feathers—warns her that it's still a tetchy subject.

"Members of the Adherency? Here?" Lana raises a brow instead, drawing her eyes away from the way her own hair burns bright under the sun. She thinks for a moment and reaches back. Sure enough, she has a hood of her own—thoughtful of him, really. She draws it up. The difference is apparent immediately. She can now look in several directions that aren't just sand, sand, and more sand. Jakku's sky, it seems, is a stunning wash-out blue, like the watercolor she'd spilled on that ancient paper drawing mat as a youngling.

Hiram lifts one feathery shoulder blade in his best approximation of a shrug. "They have especially sacred sites here—places they believe they can commune with the Force, not just hear it. It is perhaps the only thing the planet is known for... if only to the Force-sensitives of the galaxy."

"You'd think there would be ruins, or something. It's too empty." Immediately after she says it, she feels foolish. Isn't the wreckage next to them a ruin of sorts? What else are these worn-out husks of battleships?

He places a hand on the metal dome of the transportation unit's foot. It's only the absence of any singed-feather smell that tells her that the heat that presses in on them is less a reality than it is an impression—an unconscious thread underlying the memory he is showing her, something that struck him without him quite realizing it. "Indeed. I admit that I do not know where this came from—or that. These things are not mine."

"That's... a big ship," Lana mumbles, following his line of sight to the horizon, where a dead giant of a heavy-duty flagship rests, a dreadnought or larger. Probably larger. There aren't ships with engine thrusters that large in Republic space. Apropos of nothing, its harsh, jagged edges take on a familiar hue the longer she stares at the sun glinting on its breached hull—like she's been here before, like she should _know_ what happened here, and she knows what that means.

Lana looks down instead of encouraging the thought further. Suddenly, watching Hiram fold his hands into his robes is far more interesting than what lies ahead. Hiram hums when she says nothing else. "Perhaps it is of the Force. Whatever the case, beyond this place, I found a village. Come with me."

* * *

The village is the kind that isn't immediately apparent at first, buried among the desert dunes. Part of it can perhaps be attributed to the faulty aspects of memory, shortening long trips and extending tiny moments into infinity, but Lana still feels almost as if the village has snuck up on them. Hiram leads her to the largest building, more of an actual structure than most of the hovels surrounding it, and Lana peers inside. There is a shrine with desert flowers planted around it and rough tapestries on the walls, woven with clear care and attention to detail. She glances at him.

"Look deeper," he urges her. "Look at the shrine."

She shrugs and steps inside. He ducks in behind her and settles next to the doorway, watching as she makes her way forward to kneel before the dais. There is an ancient script inscribed on every edge of the shrine, vertical on its slopes, horizontal on its flat surfaces. It takes some doing, worn as it is, but she recognizes the old tongue after a confused moment of self-doubt. Her hair spills over her shoulder and her fringe gets in her eyes. With a scowl, she pushes it back and turns to Hiram. "Is the script what you meant?"

"Read it, my impatient friend," Hiram says, smiling.

Lana frowns and brushes a hand over a section of it. Sand and dust mixed together come away as if they are real things, leaving the lettering a little easier to read. _"In harmony, peace,"_ she says, brows furrowing. _"In peace, balance."_

" _In balance, harmony,"_ Hiram finishes. "A circular path. This, I was told, is what the Adherency remained here for."

"Circular logic is for droids," she mutters.

He sighs. "Have you so little respect for other traditions, Lana? We are all one in the Force. How else would you be here, part of me as I am part of you?"

"That's not what I meant." Lana stands, tucking her hands into her robes. A shadow of an echo of a memory passes them by— _a blaster at your side,_ a man's voice, the only thing Hiram hears—and it makes the sunlight flicker, for a moment harsh and cold instead of harsh and hot, and the ground beneath their feet shudders with the effort of resisting the call to follow the flow of the Force. She closes her eyes. "My apologies. There is beauty in it, it's true. But where does it begin, and where is the room for change if all things are merely reflections of one another?"

"Perhaps we aren't meant to have all the answers," Hiram says, a proposal he has offered her many times in presenting alternative points of view. It is an old play between them: she the skeptic and he the faithful, both whiling away the hours before the dawn, searching for enlightenment in lieu of the guidance of Masters not present.

Any answer she might've given him is cut short by the ominous rumble of the earth beneath their feet.

Lana strides to the entrance and peers out at the sky. Jakku's sun has grown brighter. "I think," she says after a moment, turning to Hiram with unearthly light reflected in her eyes, "we'd better pull out."

"Breathe," he advises. It is not an unkind thing, coming from him. Lana lets out a harsh breath and sucks in a gulp of too-dry air. She's very nearly glad for the pity that pulses in the air between them. Hiram lightly tugs on her braid to draw her attention. "Here. I'll initiate."

"My thanks," she murmurs, sinking to the ground. They don't _need_ to any more, not when they're pulling back from each other, but he humors her anyways and follows in a far more graceful motion than she could ever hope to manage.

Let him think that this abrupt end is the residual damage from her Master's death. It lets her pretend that they are children again, that there is an explanation to be had for the wall of light that comes for her in her worst nightmares, and if there is an explanation—well, perhaps there is hope that it can be fixed.

(She's always known better.)

* * *

Hiram stays until he is sure she isn't going to run off to the lower levels of the Temple the first chance she gets.

"I was chastised by Master Nu already," she grumbles in the appropriate Jedi griping tone, which is to say that her tone is a careful step under neutral, too disaffected for those unfamiliar with their ways to notice. "Besides, I'll be busy compiling evidence for a while. Master Kenobi's been stuck in the war room since ten standard this morning, no thanks to Hutt Space. I think."

"Working with the younglings may be beneficial," Hiram suggests, another perennial tradition. He's convinced it would do her good—that compassion for those who must be protected would lighten her demeanor, help her set her troubles free.

She only gives him the same polite smile. "Perhaps."

Another year, another patented _not-if-Mustafar-froze-over_ nonanswer of an answer. Hiram sighs. "Someday, Lana, you will listen when I speak."

"It's not you," Lana says immediately, shaking her head. "Nor is is it them. You know that, Hiram."

Hiram only fixes her with that ageless look, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, and in the end he merely puts a hand on her shoulder. "May the Force be with you, my friend."

"And with you also," she supplies, meaning it. They bow to each other and split off in separate directions, Hiram to the refectory and Lana to the Archives once more. The thought of squaring off with Master Nu once again is about the least appealing thing in the galaxy right now, particularly when something in the lower levels sings out to her as it has for the past three years, beckoning to her, calling for her, just waiting for her to find it.

 _However dearly I would love to continue my search,_ she tells herself, _this is what must be. It is through action that a Jedi is made, when it comes right down to it. Prioritized action. The search isn't exactly high on that list right now._

It rings true enough to keep her from spiraling into the familiar troughs of questioning duty and detachment and the physics of sacrifice. Conversations with Hiram always tend to end with her mulling over the purpose of the Jedi Order. She knows as much as anyone that the Jedi willingly deny themselves that they might touch something greater than any singular sentient life, but being one, becoming a Jedi—that is an entirely different matter.

Her lips thin. It is the same old story: life, death, the elements, the Force, and the Jedi at the center of it all.

But a story is a narrative, and every narrative bears faultlines within it, fractures and fissions that could widen into cavernous rifts given enough examination. Even the report on Palpatine's proclivity for Dark Side Force artifacts, the one she and Obi-Wan are painstakingly checking for bias both overt and unintended at every turn, is telling a selective truth. Truth—from a certain point of view.

She is all too familiar with _perspectives._

* * *

Dealing with a disgruntled Jedi is a careful balancing act in pretended ignorance and mild half-questions less meant for answers than to get the Jedi in question to come back to themselves, to _think_ about what they're saying. There are more shadows of Anakin Skywalker in Obi-Wan Kenobi than there had been two years ago, Lana thinks, scanning his brisk sections of their report while he quietly stews on her meditation cushion, a Jedi Master in unsettled repose. She takes an unhurried sip of tea and takes up the datapad's stylus once again, appending a summarizing note to the end of one of his paragraphs: _Mirthidian marble bust of an ancestor, infused with Dark energy—archival records support idea that the specific technique used to store Force energy in this object was meant to be sustained by sentient sacrifice—where was this acquired?_

"Rogue One and Fulcrum released very similar stories at zero three hundred hours last night," Obi-Wan finally informs her, as businesslike in tone as his writing can get. "It took most of the morning, but our Shadows verified the information contained in them. It will affect the course of this investigation, I'm afraid. Rather difficult for it not to when both stories suggest that the Chancellor had enough of a hand in the creation of an army for the Republic to have taken several progress check visits to Kamino within the past decade."

"Flight logs?" Lana asks, looking up when she finishes writing a sentence. She'd had to read it twice to make sure she hadn't misspelled anything—between Daud and her archival jaunts, she's hardly slept a wink.

Obi-Wan frowns. "Pardon?"

"Flight logs—did they look at them, or something? It's the only thing I can think of. Sounds awfully hard to track down, though." She shrugs. "The Chancellor had two Lambda-class shuttles—one was the 32c subtype, which is technically still only in the conceptual phases—"

"Padawan Ruhr," he says, a note of amused warning in his voice.

Lana clears her throat. "My apologies, Master Kenobi. I find it very interesting that two separate parties are also pursuing an investigation into the Chancellor."

"Evidently," he agrees. He lets out a long sigh, breathing his frustrations into the air as he reaches for the Force, and the furrow of his brows loosens when the Force readily allows him to touch it—though why he expects resistance she isn't sure, not when the only thing keeping its currents from swirling around him at all times is the physical matter he inhabits. Finally he opens his eyes and looks at her, the trademark Kenobi smile curling one side of his lips, one eyebrow arched in polite confusion. "Is there something on my face, Padawan?"

"No, but I was wondering if you meant to include this sentence in the report," she says, proffering the datapad to him. Obi-Wan takes it and scans his own work.

"I'm tempted to," he says after a moment, face a mixture of amusement, chagrin, and remembered irritation at the incident that had inspired his snarky comment about Senatorial judicial proceedings. It's a rare kind of honesty coming from him, which can only mean he's too preoccupied to mind the way he's coming across. Lana hums in response and looks at the tired bags beneath his eyes, the tense set to his shoulders, the stress that lines his face—he is aging before his time, she realizes, looking back across the years to the day she had seen that young man in a place she hadn't known was a reactor, holding his dead Master.

 _Circles,_ she thinks, her conversation with Hiram echoing in the confines of her mind. Risse Keera's smile remains in her heart. She puts a hand on her braid, closing her eyes for a moment. _Perhaps we all move in circles, sons making the mistakes of their fathers, grandsons repeating the same old stories, forgetting the gravity of their errors. Perhaps the Adherency has a point, after all. Perhaps there is value in remembering the past—in learning from our mistakes._

But what she says when she opens her eyes is this: "Ever been spelunking, Master Kenobi?"

His blue-green gaze meets hers. "I'm somewhat familiar with the act," he says, irony threading his tone, an apprenticeship's worth of memories behind his words.

Where Qui-Gon has gotten off to, she doesn't know. Lana stands and tucks her hands into her robes, finding for a moment that she rather misses the calm, steadying presence of the old Master. "Then let's explore the lower levels," she urges, finally paying heed to the call from deep within the Temple. "Exploration is an exercise in centering one's self in the present moment—in removing our attention from what might be or what once was, and instead focusing us on what _is_. I could do with some centering—"

"And a way to escape the censure of Master Nu, I'm sure," he says lightly, but he stands with her regardless. "Very well. You've a point, Padawan. It may indeed be more prudent to take a break. If anyone asks, you're showing me what this Temple exploration business is all about."

"Of course," Lana says with a grin, feeling very much like she has a partner in crime.


	9. Chapter 9

"General, a communiqué for you."

"From?" Under his breath: "And how? This comm station's a piece of junk. I built the damn thing, I'd know."

"They're using a voice modulator, but they call themselves Fulcrum."

"Patch them through, soldier."

"On it, sir."

Silence. Then the sound of harsh mechanical breath: _shh-hiss, shh-hiss._

"Fulcrum," Anakin Skywalker says, arms crossed under the sun of Jakku, the desert winds biting at his clothing, at what little exposed skin he hadn't been able to find an excuse to cover. He is not so old that he has forgotten how sand settles into every fold and crevasse in even the simplest of outfits; it is the feel-memory of sand and gritty tunics that is with him now in this desolate wasteland, this nowhere of a planet. "You had something for me?"

"That's right," Fulcrum says, their holographic icon nothing more than two diamonds separated by two crooked lines with arrow indents in the middle. Several of his men draw in quiet breaths. They're familiar with the importance of symbols, Anakin knows—they'd had to memorize the significance of them in military history courses as part of their education on Kamino. Whatever they see in Fulcrum's chosen avatar, Anakin's going to have to ask later. "By the light of Lothal's moons, I bring you hope. I think you'll find these documents rather interesting."

"What documents?" he counters, raising an eyebrow.

"Clinical records from Kamino. Studies, professional journals, observations—that sort of thing. Word is that you could use some data."

Anakin glances at Rex, who meets his gaze evenly. Too evenly. He sighs and turns back to the hologram, the two hours Rex spent stressing the importance of verifiable evidence still ringing in his ears. "I'll take them."

There are times when Obi-Wan's careful modeling of purposeful blindness comes in handy, but Rex is absolutely going to be the one organizing the camp's watch duty schedule for the next few days. Did he really think Anakin wouldn't notice a brewing independence movement under his nose, even if he hadn't known the underlying reasons for it before he'd read Fives' journal?

"General!"

Every man gathered near the makeshift comm stiffens at the urgency in Appo's voice as he calls out from the path leading to Cratertown; a second later he emerges from the steep downwards slope, pulling his helmet off of his head with an exhaled curse. "General," he says, sucking in a breath of greedy air. Anakin doesn't begrudge him for it, not when he remembers the desert, not when it's shoved in his face like this. "The intel was accurate—Count Dooku has been sighted near the Carbon Ridge. Your orders, sir?"

"We finish this and make for the Carbon Ridge. With me," Anakin commands Rex and Appo, suddenly feeling almost sick as the gravity of the situation hits him. His last encounter with Dooku—his last real one, anyways—had been aboard the _Invisible Hand_. The mere shadow of what had almost happened on that ship makes him swallow. He clenches his hands into fists, one metal, one still sensitive thanks to an accidental burn while handling rations. The grating sensation of his burnt palm against the sweaty leather of his glove is the only thing in the galaxy that seems capable of centering him, so he clenches it tighter, hones in on it with single-minded focus. He tries not to think about what kind of state-of-the-art cybernetic arms might be available to a rich man who has lost both. "There will be no one to stop us this time. He _cannot_ escape us, men. Understood?"

"Understood!"

Grievous sneers in his memories, a towering figure in a dark cape, a brute made more of machinery than flesh. _There will be no end,_ he had said, 'saber locked with Anakin's, _until I have destroyed every last remnant of the Republic. Until you have laid waste to every Separatist world!_

It had been Grievous that retrieved the Count that day, but in the present, the Separatists' most ruthless General has been dead for two years by Obi-Wan's hand. Nobody has risen up to take his place. In that time, Anakin has replayed every moment he'd experienced on the _Invisible Hand_ in his mind's eye, gone searching for shadows and found more than he'd ever dreamed possible. Obi-Wan hadn't pried the last time they'd met, like he might've before everything, before the war. He had merely given Anakin a long look when the subject was tentatively breached.

 _I don't expect you to try to be better,_ that look had said. _I expect you to be better. To be unaffected._

For the briefest moment of ringing insanity, a betrayal of everything he knows Obi-Wan hopes for him, Anakin sends up a prayer to all the desert gods and goddesses he remembers. _Please_ , he begs. _Please, let there be an end to this. For my children and my children's children, if nothing else._

Even on Jakku, where the Force is muted and the world doesn't thrum around him and hum in his veins, a bad feeling settles in the pit of his stomach.

It will not be that easy, he knows. It never is.

* * *

Some time after Obi-Wan has left her quarters to present their report— _based on our evidence, the Chancellor's activities, as well as his untimely death, ought to be investigated more closely and we formally request further support_ indeed—to Mace Windu, Lana yawns despite her nerves and her attempts to remain focused on the meditation Obi-Wan had advised her to do; her eyes fly open very nearly against her will to take in a snowy forest humming with unseen energy. She frowns and brings her hand up to her field of vision.

Pale and white and small, though long-fingered and callused by years of 'saber training. Still hers. But her robes are absent; instead she is dressed in muted blues and greens, with the heavy-duty pants and dusty vest of the average spacer fitted exactly to her tiny frame. Far from standard Jedi wear.

Lana sighs and gives the undersides of the leaves above her head a weary look. "This again?"

The forest offers no response. With a scowl, she turns her head. The forest looks the same all the way around. There's no path or trodden snow or anything that suggests she's ever been in here before; she can't feel the bite of cold air on her bared shoulders, even though when she kneels and drags a hand through the snow it comes away as chilled and damp as if she'd balled it up in her fingers.

 _Well, then,_ she thinks, spins around, and starts walking south.

Let the past come to _her,_ this time.

She should know better. Truth be told, she does know better—she can admit that much to herself, even if her jaw tightens at the thought. But she isn't testing the Force, not _really_. She's—engaging in a creative exploration of the means it has given her. Lana nods to herself and resolves to see how viciously Master Yoda will rip the explanation apart as soon as he returns.

And that's when a lightsaber ignites next to her face.

"Who are you?" a man asks, voice low with barely-restrained fury.

Her nerves, already standing on the edge thanks to the life-sucking moment of terror that is having a humming blade of pure plasma spring into existence next to your face, turn to ice at the sound of his voice. "Nobody special," she chokes out, heart pounding in her chest. His 'saber is red and his very presence makes the dim light filtering in from above falter.

"You're not supposed to be here," he snarls. "Get out."

"Unfortunately, I'm not sure how I got here. Best-laid plans, all that business," she replies. It takes significant effort to tamp down on the spurt of hysterical laughter bubbling up in her chest at how utterly calm her voice somehow sounds. It feels like she's on _fire,_ this primal adrenaline burning in her veins, and she hasn't felt it in so long that it's damn near bubbling over inside her.

Something about the way she says it makes the Darksider pause. "You..."

"Dreadfully sorry, but I've an appointment to keep," she interrupts, taking advantage of his momentary distraction to duck away from his lightsaber and sprint for the trees. He gives chase to her almost immediately, his boots thudding heavily against the forest floor, but from the sound of it his frame is far broader than hers; she ducks through the trees with impunity, giving in and letting the Force guide her through close-set trunks and broad stretches of low-hanging branches.

"Wait," he shouts. It echoes in the silence of the trees around them. "Wait, I do know you, you're a—"

"Impossible," she shouts back, cutting him off as she dodges around a branch. "I'm no one!"

"You're not the only person I've known who's said that—"

"Were they right?"

"Well, yes!"

Lana sucks in a shaky breath and scrambles up and over a slick, slippery boulder. "Then perhaps you ought to do us nobodies the favor of believing us," she says from the top, still refusing to look back at her pursuer. "We tend to know about these sorts of things."

"The difference," he says, breathing harsh and pained, "is that you're lying."

She freezes. "No, I'm not," she says, feeling very lame even as the words come out of her mouth. Her voice feels very far away.

"You are." He's certain now, pacing closer, and the Force does so love its ironies. "You're somebody. I've seen you before, in a vision. And now here."

"A Jedi has no self. A Jedi can't be somebody," she insists, hand flying to her braid. It lands on her shoulder. She looks down with wide eyes.

Where _is_ it?

"If you were a Jedi," the man says, "you'd have your lightsaber with you at all times. You're a Force-user, I've seen you use it. You ought to know yourself. It's what we're meant to do, Jedi or no."

He takes a step forward. She holds her breath and tries to remember if this has ever happened to her before. Twigs and snow crackle underneath his feet.

The Force surges moments before the earth roars; both of them look at the sky they can see through the trees and behold the darkness of space and the burning white light of a dying star surging against each other, battling for supremacy.

"Not all light is safe," he says, almost to himself, voice full of a fey kind of wonder, and the boulder splits apart beneath Lana.

For a brief second before she falls out of sight, his eyes connect with hers. His gaze is young and full of fear and a feckless kind of daring, the kind every starpilot in the galaxy has to have to get into a metal death machine and launch themselves into the vast expanse of the unknown universe, and she can only think _what is it like to be so free?_ before she's gasping on the floor of her apartment, someone's hand on her shoulder, a man's voice patiently repeating the old Jedi maxims in her ear.

It's an anchor in the dark. Insensate, Lana latches on to the sound and regulates her breathing with the kind of care better devoted to defusing bombs or defragging finicky navicomps in outdated ships. A distant, quiet part of her mind observes that only Darksiders seem to be able to sense her presence when she's subjected to the whims of the Force; the thought is something she categorically refuses to deal with, and so she pushes it aside and focuses on breathing.

"Lana," the man says eventually, and after a blistering moment of confusion, she opens her eyes and meets Obi-Wan's gaze. Jedi Master or no, there's worry painted in the creases of his face. Lana looks down and to the left, swallowing the shame rising up in her throat, but at least whatever he's thinking is safely hidden behind his shields. "You had a vision, I presume?"

"Or a waking dream. A shadow," she whispers, struggling not to fall back on the old crutch of her childhood phrases, still shaken unduly by the young man's words.

Obi-Wan sits beside her, a Jedi General in the Clone Wars, old before his time, a living, breathing legend who visibly winces at the way his joints creak when he eases himself down. "Tell me," he says as gently as a war hero can, an invitation, and for one agonizing moment it is Risse Keera looking at her out of his eyes, compassionate and caring.

"Nothing about the Chancellor this time," she says, forcing herself to move her legs into the lotus position instead of keeping them tucked up against her chest. "I found myself in a forest with a Darksider who seemed to know me. He told me to know myself—said all Force-users were meant to. The vision fell apart before I learned much else."

"This disturbed you," he says more than he asks, and she wonders if she is more failure than Jedi for it.

"We are often counseled to let go of the self," she says after a moment of consideration.

She feels more than she sees Obi-Wan's gaze turn heavenward. "Indeed," he says drily. "We are also counseled to listen to the Force when it chooses to speak. What is a Jedi to heed—the Force or the Force-follower?"

"The Force," she murmurs, brows furrowing. Just because she would very much _like_ to sigh during a Master's didactic speech doesn't mean she would get away with it if she happened to give in to her desires. It's maddening, sometimes, the restraints on the life they all live, and she thinks she can understand why Anakin Skywalker would be such a nerve-burner. Desert children are different from the rest, and you could never expect a child of the dunes to take lectures on temperance and temerity and subservience very well at all. Not when stillness in the desert so often meant death for any sentient that let themselves be lulled into complacency.

Maybe that's why the Jedi didn't kick him out for marrying Senator Amidala. Then again, maybe that's why he's been on the front lines for two years, fighting the Republic's battles where the fiercest of warriors are needed. Lana's lips twist against her will.

"The teachings that advocate for focusing one's mind on that which is beyond the self must always be interpreted in light of the understanding that letting go of our preconceptions is what best enables us to reach the Force," Obi-Wan has been saying, and there's something ardent in his eyes that hadn't been there before. It takes Lana a moment to recognize it.

 _Faith_ , she thinks, nodding once. _I'll be damned. Hiram has a point_.

"It is among the most difficult of lessons for a Jedi to learn," he tells her, easing up onto his feet and offering her a hand. She takes it and he pulls her up. "But it is a most valuable one. We learn and relearn it at every step of the way, Padawan. Let this guide you deeper into the Light."

"Yes, Master," she murmurs, the words a well-worn acknowledgment on her tongue.

Obi-Wan does not smile at her, but he does look—pleased, almost. Content with her response. But it passes. He grows serious all too soon, shifting to look out her window, and for the first time she realizes how much time has gone by—mid-morning to late afternoon, a too-long span of hours that had hardly existed in the vision. "I've presented our report to Master Windu; the Council will be deliberating over it as soon as they are able—likely when Master Yoda returns."

"But this isn't over for us," Lana says despite herself. There is something in the way the shadows of her quarters cast his face in stark relief that tells her so, something indomitable and grim and steely if she tilts her head and studies the red-gold glint of the sun framing his cream tunics in creases and folds. There is something in the hope that he carries with him.

"No indeed," he replies, his customary humor making a brief appearance in the way his eyes crinkle at the corners. "While the Council will be handing the report to the Senate eventually, you and I have another task altogether. Something most dangerous."

She eyes his pleased smile with distinct wariness. "And what is that?"

"Getting you field-ready. How are your Niman forms coming along, Padawan Ruhr?" he asks. His eyes are _twinkling._

"We're going into the field, huh," Lana muses instead of answering, folding her hands into her robes.

"When I deem you combat-ready, yes," is Obi-Wan's reply as he makes his way to the door. He slants a look at her over his shoulder. "Come along, now. We'd best thank Master Vos for returning just in time to point us in the direction of Naboo—should our negotiations go well, we'll have access to the Chancellor's personal estate."

Lana stands. "And more artifacts?"

"Most likely, but I suspect there will be more there than mere artifacts," he says. The door slides shut behind them. He sets a stiff pace for the turbolift; if she focuses, she thinks she can almost sense the faint twinging of his leg like it's her own. "Word is that an old friend has been sighted on-planet, after all, and trouble follows after him wherever he goes."

Lana glances at his perfectly serene face and feels the ice underlying the facade. _An old friend. Got it_ , she thinks, deciding not to push it. _Up has become down, and space has breathable air. Perfectly understood._

* * *

"Threepio," Padmé says patiently, rescuing the poor droid from the toddler chewing happily on his golden fingers. "He's not going to eat you. He was just—gnawing on you. It's what babies do, you know."

She'd never known that a face without expression could look so panicked before C-3PO had become her full-time helper. He steps back, unconvinced, arms hitting his chest with a small, metallic _thunk_. "Pardon my saying so, Mistress Padmé, but prior to your return, Master Luke and Mistress Leia were—taking _turns_ trying to do so! It's dreadful for my processor. Being a teething toy is not one of my primary functions."

"Is it a secondary one?" she asks, summoning her Senatorial mask from the depths of her being to keep the smile off her face.

As C-3PO flounders for a response, Padmé finds her gaze drawn to the skyline. The Jedi Temple shines bright in the Coruscanti sun, a blazing torch against the grey, drab tops of the buildings surrounding it. Luke throws his little arms around her neck, babbling happily in her ear; his hair is the light blond Anakin's had been when she had met him all those years ago, a dusty boy in a junk shop asking her if she was an angel. She pulls her son closer, not sure where the sudden, unsettled feeling in her heart has come from.

"Ani," she murmurs, eyes fixed on the Temple as she brushes her lips over Luke's head. Tomorrow will bring more meetings with Bail Organa, more preparation for the election of an emergency Chancellor, more stress and time away from her children. But in this moment they are with her, Leia snoozing peacefully on the couch and Luke nudging his little nose into the crook of her neck, and she is reminded of the reason she and Anakin chose to continue fighting after the fallout from their marriage going public. "Be safe. Come back to me. Come back to us."


	10. Chapter 10

At fifteen, the stars in the sky are at once both infinite and untouchable to Lana Viszka Ruhr.

"Lana," Risse Keera calls through the door to her room. "Have you finished reviewing for MATF yet?"

"No, Master," Lana calls back, a tad grudging. A scheduling mishap on account of the brief sector-wide power outage resulted in Lana taking the basic-level metaphysics course twice (it is rather charmingly titled Metaphysics and the Force, or, as one of her fellow Padawans prefers to say, Enlightened Snoozing for Dummies), and Risse had been the one to judge the computer error as Force-sent. _Let humility grow in you, my young Padawan, whatever life's circumstances,_ or something of the like. Lana looks down at the criss-cross pattern that the artificial moon shining through the window paints on her tunic and wonders when the Force will send her a break.

Risse pokes her head through Lana's door, her lekku drawn up in her sleep headwear, a frown on her face that falters when she takes a look at her Padawan. Lana feels the poke at her shields and drops eye contact; Risse pauses, then steps fully into the room. "You're troubled, Padawan mine."

"Hiram's not here," Lana mumbles, shifting her datapad under her robes as casually as she can. He's out there in the stars, somewhere in the galaxy, exploring abandoned Jedi temples with Master Bar'qo.

"We must let go of our attachments." A challenge.

Lana looks up, temper flaring. "I'm not _attached._ Master. With all due respect."

"Oh, clearly," Risse says blandly. She settles gracefully in front of Lana and observes her young apprentice with the maddeningly impassive mask she'd started adopting around the time Lana had hit puberty. With her lekku bound loosely behind her back, Lana can't see if they're twitching or not. _Blast,_ she thinks, fifteen and petulant. "What concerns me is this lack of trust you seem to have in me. When did the galaxy begin to rely upon your shoulders, hmm?"

"It doesn't," Lana says, too quick. Her lips thin at Risse's blatant snort. "No, truly, Master, I know it doesn't. My concerns were foolish, and I knew you were attempting to sleep. It was my last wish to bother you."

Risse tilts her head. "And yet here we are. Your shields are not your strongest point, Padawan—save the grandstanding for a day when you can back it up. For now, as your Master, I'd like to know what has you so spun up that you haven't begun to study at... ah, yes, twenty-one hundred hours standard time."

Lana is silent for a long time, but Risse knows by now that it is not defiance that keeps her from speaking. Eventually, she speaks. "Master... have you ever heard of the concept of fixed points in time?"

"Is _that_ what you've been reading up on?" Risse asks, unable to quite hide her amusement.

It earns her a plaintive, wounded look. "Master!"

"Continue, Padawan," is the suspiciously serene reply. Risse Keera is many things, but a skilled liar among friends is not one of them.

"It doesn't matter, anyways," Lana mutters. "It's all theoretical. Hardly practical. Master Jhevak's text only has a sentence about it."

Risse sighs. Lana jumps when Risse's hand enters her field of vision and tugs on her braid. "I trust you will remember that we made a deal to research your visions _after_ your Metaphysics final, Padawan. As long as you have duties to attend to in the present, there you must remain. The Force will guide you from there."

"Yes, Master," Lana replies, young and too disturbed to hide it well.

Risse surveys her for a long moment. "We're going out," she announces suddenly, standing. "Come, Padawan. A task awaits us."

Datapad and its contents forgotten, Lana hurries to her feet and follows Risse into the sitting room, the prospect of some new adventure for the moment exciting enough to wipe her worries from her mind.

Some things never quite change.

* * *

In the vastness of space, there is... life.

There are his men, with him in a metal box, every signature unique, a life bound to every other through the Force. He looks at them and sees a future, dark and clouded, echoing with the screams of dead men in valleys built of black stone and whalebones. But the future is constant, and so he passes on.

There are ancient creatures, sleeping in asteroids, lurking by hyperlanes. They await unwary spacers and inhabit graveyards of dry bones. These, too, are bound, because a life is a life regardless of the shape it takes. A life is sacred by the very fact of its existence.

Lives are sacred. The chaos in the galaxy seeping into space and waking things long since put to rest is _not._

Yoda hums. Reaches deeper.

The grand vista of infinity sprawls out before him, the Force in it all and through it all, the tangled, gnarled roots of that-which-was lying under, the discord brewing on every possible horizon, and he—

—remains unmoved. As a Jedi should, yes, a Jedi who sees the Force as a tool, but he is not old for nothing, he has not seen better Jedi than he be reduced to tears by the diaphanous beauty of this view for no reason, and Yoda observes the darkness carving fault lines into the universe and thinks—

— _children we once were, yes, children we remain—_

—and something demands his attention.

It is not the ghosts of the old Sith stirring from their graves, no. They remember him. They loathe him. They would not seek to weave their subtle webs around him, around the Grand Master of the Jedi Order, old before they were young.

No. It is another.

 _My old Master,_ the voice of Qui-Gon Jinn says warmly. _How long it has been._

 _Late, you are,_ Yoda harrumphs, glad in spite of himself. But the Force does not waver because of this lapse; neither does his concentration. _Neglected, I feel._

 _My apologies—I had some pressing business._ It has the ring of a joke to it, some untold story that Yoda is not privy to, and he is reminded of how the world inside Qui-Gon's mind had only ever been fully accessible to the man himself, a model Jedi in every respect save one.

 _Time for apologies, it is not. Speak to me, you wish to,_ he says to Qui-Gon, because the Force murmurs with purpose, with intent, but hesitation also. Far more characteristic of his Padawan than of Qui-Gon himself. Obi-Wan always was given to doubt, to questioning, to seeking the best way to walk the path before starting upon it. Perhaps a decade in the Force has taught Qui-Gon what all the meditation and lectures on temperance in the galaxy could not.

There is silence, and then the sense of Qui-Gon drawing himself up. For a moment, Yoda can again see the young man under Dooku's tutelage lifting his chin, tucking his hands into his sleeves, determined to follow the will of the Force regardless of what anyone else thought. _To the point, as ever. I ask only that you listen until the end, Master._

* * *

"Look who's back," Quinlan Vos says, something wry in the twist of his lips when Obi-Wan walks back into his room in the medbay. In contrast to the last time he saw him—all of a standard hour ago—he is now propped up against the bedframe, one arm in a sling, the other wrapped with bandages. There are more wounds beneath the loose shirt—how they got the bloodstained shirt off him is beyond Obi-Wan, but the fact that Quinlan visibly grimaces when he shifts speaks volumes. "Couldn't stay away, huh?"

"Oh, indeed," Obi-Wan shoots back with a sardonic lift of the brow, taking up a place against the wall. "The sight of your face was so hideous I had to make sure I wasn't having a nightmare."

From the doorway, Lana snorts despite herself. Both men look at her; she stares back blankly, then— _"Oh_. My apologies, Masters. It won't happen again."

"I'm glad to see that you're in fine form, Padawan Ruhr," Quinlan says before Obi-Wan can reprimand her.

He's grinning. With Quinlan, that's never a good sign.

She raises an eyebrow at him, a kind of daring determination flashing across her face. It's a look that's started to give Obi-Wan a headache. Sure enough: "You flatter me, Master Vos. I could never hope to live up to you."

"I'm glad to see that you two already know each other and treat each other with all due respect," Obi-Wan mutters, _sotto voce,_ and the two of them look at him in one synchronized motion.

"Master Vos was the one who found me," Lana offers by way of explanation.

Quinlan nods. "And it looks like time has evened that temper out—my right arm thanks the Force for that. She bit me when we first met, did you know?"

"I did not _bite_ you, Master," she interrupts stiffly. "I was—"

"—staging an attack to rescue my Padawan from the perceived injustice of leaving her outside to guard the entrance," he says, looking at Obi-Wan mournfully. There's a glint of amusement in his eyes that Obi-Wan has been on the receiving end of far too often. "I felt _teeth,_ Obi. In fact, there might still be a scar. Would you like to see?"

Lana's scowl is thunderous, but her signature in the Force sparks with thinly-concealed entertainment. "Many of the truths we cling to greatly depend upon our point of view," she says, like she's quoting someone, but despite the familiarity of it, Obi-Wan can hardly think of who could have possibly originated it. A great deal of the Jedi texts talk about points of view, after all, and he's read most of them. Remembering the specifics is beginning to be beyond him at his age.

"And that's why you're headed to Naboo," Quinlan says, awfully satisfied with himself.

Obi-Wan nods. "As soon as her lightsaber skills are up to par, yes. Thank you for the tip. If Maul is still on-planet, I would prefer to take every precaution."

"So that was his name," Lana muses. "The Archives only record his presence as _the Darksider with the double-bladed lightsaber."_

"Suffice it to say, one is rather forced to learn their enemy's name when he pursues them for a decade and a half," he says, dark and dry, and ignores the feeling of surprise Quinlan tosses his way at his openness.

Lana nods in agreement, as if she's familiar with the situation. "That'll happen."

"In any case..." Obi-Wan eases away from the wall and digs out a datachip. He hands it to Lana. "This has the details of the particular mission we'll be undertaking. Familiarize yourself with the contents and head down to the salles to warm up—I should be along shortly."

"As you wish, Master." Lana bows to them both and makes to leave, but she pauses in the doorway, her braid jangling against her shoulder. Under the harsh light of the medbay overheads, her eyes are nearly a pale blue as she glances back at Quinlan. "Master Vos, I'm glad to see you safe. May the Force be with you."

Then she is gone, leaving silence in her wake. Quinlan glances at Obi-Wan with an uncharacteristic caution. "Obi..."

"I know," Obi-Wan says wearily, folding his arms against his chest. A grumpy refrain that was a constant in his younger years— _Master, why do I sense that we've picked up another pathetic lifeform?_ —plays on repeat in the back of his mind, harder to banish because of the vaguely unsettled feelings coming from Anakin's direction.

Quinlan tilts his head and studies him. "You do," he says finally.

"I'm not completely blind, contrary to popular belief," he snips, tossing his friend the fearsome Kenobi classic—an icy glare complete with furrowed brows and what Anakin likes to call the _'Anakin-you're-giving-me-a-coronary'_ look when he's not in earshot.

"You don't know what I was going to say," Quinlan points out, leaning back in the bed, resting his bandaged arm at his side. He's never been fazed by Obi-Wan's irritability—not as a youngling, not as a Padawan, and never as Knights and Masters, working side-by-side. It can be galling, sometimes. "War has made you even more disagreeable, my friend. I remember Padawan Kenobi. That's quite a feat."

"Yes, well, I'm surprised more don't remember him," Obi-Wan grumbles. Looking back at him across the years, he thinks that the young man he had once been would perhaps get along better with Anakin than the man he has become. Padawan Kenobi was possessed of an energy that was not unlike Anakin's daring tenacity, after all. Obi-Wan isn't sure whether he lost that energy when Anakin began to habitually shorten Obi-Wan's life expectancy by ten years with every foolhardy stunt or when Maul had nearly killed Satine on Mandalore, but the fact is that his endurance is now less of a fire and more embers and ashes. Still glowing, but on the verge of being extinguished.

Quinlan looks at him then, and Obi-Wan waits, because the thin line of Quinlan's lips is as serious as he ever gets. "They don't need to," he says finally. "His spirit lives on in Padawans like her. And besides, I remember. So do Bant and Garen—"

"Quinlan."

The testy warning makes him sigh. "Oh, come on. They're out on the field, but that doesn't mean they've forgotten. Anyways, just—be patient with her, Obi. There hasn't been a Padawan more fitting to inherit the title of Supreme Brooder since, well, _you."_

"Anakin is currently the defending champion of that title," Obi-Wan informs him. "I suspect it is a defect in the teaching line, passed down from teacher to student, and it shall be thus forevermore."

Quinlan snorts. "Right, sure. Be careful out there. I'd hate to see you get lost in your own personal cloud of gloom and doom, _Master Kenobi."_

"Let us make a deal, Master Vos. You stop getting yourself abducted by various Force-abusing cults, and I shall stop—how did you put it? Ah, yes. I shall stop _finding trouble in a broom closet."_ Obi-Wan's smile is more than a little snarky.

"I don't know how you found out about that, but I stand by it," Quinlan says, knocking his undamaged fist against his chest. "I can't believe your Padawan only enabled your skulduggery. Well, no, I can, but most of us expected you to take on someone like Ferus Olin, you know?"

Obi-Wan turns around. Only then does he let himself roll his eyes. _"Goodbye,_ Quinlan."

"May the Force be with you," is the cheery reply.

Obi-Wan sighs. "And also with you," he replies, if not a little grudgingly.

* * *

Whatever Dooku is doing, he's brought backup.

Anakin breathes out through his nose, drawing the scarf around his mouth again to prevent the sand from getting in when he takes a deep breath. The Carbon Ridge isn't nearly as extensive as the Jundland Wastes back on Tatooine had been, but what it lacks in geographical width it more than makes up for in sheer verticality. He casts a wary glance up at the peaks above, then at the sands below. The mountain itself looks sturdy enough—but there would be nowhere to take shelter in if a sandstorm came through, and the locals had warned one of his scouts that it might.

 _R'iia's breath,_ they'd called it. Attributed its power to the fury of a desert goddess.

He eyes the droid sentries milling about the path up ahead. "Rust buckets," he mutters, glaring at their scraped hulls. Whoever made them certainly did it cheaply—their guns look like they're made of scrap metal, their builds are even more skeletal and bare-bones than even the lowest-level T-0921 series compactible durasteel droids, and Anakin's willing to bet that whatever metal they're made out of, it's not a pure alloy. It's practically criminal, as Obi-Wan would think very loudly whenever Anakin tried to prepare tea as a Padawan. "When was the last time they went in for servicing?"

"Well, sir, it does make getting over there easier," Rex says, nodding to the outcropping further beyond the droids. It's their next point of investigation, mostly thanks to what looks like a man-made platform glinting black under the desert sun.

"It's a crime to droidkind, but we have to," Anakin murmurs. Briefly, he wonders how many times he has thought along those lines these past two years; wonders what Padmé would think. Of his words. Of him. He is no longer nineteen and desperate to catch his one shooting star. War has changed what the Jedi could not, and he swallows the brightness of the sky and tries to push the thought away. "Right, men. On my command."

The world falls silent and buzzes with the nervous energy of a squad of soldiers, with the life force of men who have been preordained for a purpose they have no say in.

Anakin draws in a breath and sets his jaw. If he concentrates very hard, he can feel a presence very near to them. It is fuzzy and indistinct at the edges, but it lingers like an old friend and settles into the back of his mind as if it has always been there.

 _Visiskuma,_ his mind tells him, like he has always known it. And perhaps he has. Perhaps he was always meant to feel the heat of the sun on his head, his chest, his arms and legs, until everything around him and in him is molten with the glowing golden currents of the Force spiraling out into the galaxy. _Ja'ak, ja'ak. In power I am set free._

"Now," he barks out, putting thoughts of destiny out of his mind. He is starting a battle here in the present, and he will not fail his men.

Jakku's sun burns on as blaster fire fills the air.

* * *

 **visiskuma - "absolution". Sith language.**

 **ja'ak - "I am free". Phrase. Sith language.**

 **Sourced from Codex Ulgo.**

 **Thanks to tomockingbird for being a wonderful beta reader.**


	11. Chapter 11

"Senator Amidala, Senator Organa. Thank you for coming."

Mace Windu wears the face of a weary man, even for a Jedi. Padmé musters up a gracious smile. Beside her, Bail nods. "Of course, Master Jedi. The Senate is most eager to hear what you have to tell us."

"Indeed." Mace looks even wearier at that, and stands with the smooth grace borne of years of training. He strides over to the holoprojector and taps a button. Padmé tilts her head—she's been in this particular room in the Jedi Temple multiple times over the past few years, but looking around with fresh eyes, it occurs to her for the first time that the technology the Jedi are using is by and large very old. Living with Anakin and all his mechanical fiddly bits has taught her something of the Republic's technological history; to see the way the duraplast casings on the holoprojector are scratched and worn with the ages that have surely passed since it was installed is something of a new understanding, at least in light of Mace's expression. "Understand that we, the Jedi, have investigated to the best of our ability. We present nothing but the truth as it has been found."

Padmé and Bail very carefully do not exchange glances, although she can see Bail's aborted motion to turn in the corner of her eyes. "The Senate trusts the Jedi," Padmé says, stepping forward to get a better look at the document that is being projected to them. For once, the words don't taste of lead. She has said them many, many times, perhaps more than she ought to have said them, but she never was good at letting go of hopeless causes. Not like the Jedi themselves seem to be. There is good in the Jedi Order, she knows it. Their contributions to the galaxy as a whole are eminently valuable—even if they had once been more beneficial as peacekeepers, not warriors.

The thought doesn't waver once in her mind, even as she feels the blood drain from her face with each paragraph she reads. Long conversations with Anakin and Obi-Wan, some over encrypted comms, some in person, some conducted in stages of text transmissions and captioned holos and voice clips exchanged while they were off in one end of the galaxy or another, all played their part in convincing her of the importance of the Order, however flawed it is.

Funny, how the two of them refuse to talk to each other about their philosophies and yet find themselves standing in positions that are separated only by semantics. Where Anakin sees the Jedi as a potential force for social justice, Obi-Wan insists that their primary purpose in the wider galaxy is peacekeeping—something not entirely dissimilar to what Anakin has expressed to her, really.

"Oh my," Bail murmurs, pulling the part of Padmé's mind that has been separating her current reality from the realm of her thoughts back into sharp focus. Bail's hand twitches at his side, like he wishes to cover his mouth. Padmé glances at the section he's perusing and sees a picture of the incense burner that the Chancellor had often had out during his visits with her.

Then she reads the accompanying text.

"It was an aid for _Sith rituals?"_ Padmé blurts out, feeling sick. She knows tragically little of the history of Force-users and Force usage, but she remembers Obi-Wan's return from Jabiim, the shadows in his eyes, the way Anakin had trembled as he held her and refused to tell her what had happened.

 _Sith artifacts are dangerous,_ Obi-Wan had ended up telling her. _Anything imbued with Dark energy is. The Dark only wants to ruin. To destroy. It will use anything to accomplish its purposes._

It had taken him nearly a year to recover from that, and even now she sometimes sees him pause when he plays with Luke and Leia, eyes going glassy and distant with remembered horrors that he never speaks a word of. If that's at all what the incense burner is like...

"Our investigators noted that it looked to have been used recently," Mace confirms.

Bail puts a hand on her shoulder. "Padmé."

"What else is there?" Padmé turns to Mace, setting her jaw at the suspicion in his eyes. He means well, she knows, but like much of the Jedi Order, he has never been complimentary of her marriage to Ani. _If they can't see_ —she starts, but stops herself with a little shake of the head. She can't think about that right now. "Please, Master Jedi. I must know the depths of this."

"Of course. That is why you're here," is Mace's careful, measured reply.

Padmé turns back to the report, trying not to scowl. She has a job to do.

* * *

The first thought Anakin has when he steps into what looks to be a research facility is this:

 _Damn. Obi-Wan was right._

Spread out before him and his men is a large hexagonal room, sleek and steely, with a very large data terminal in the center—it looks almost like an obelisk with a bunch of control panels surrounding it, a blocky design that Anakin wouldn't have chosen for himself given some design specs and half a chance. _It's just—inelegant._ Rex shifts at his side; Anakin glances at him, and Rex shrugs. "I've seen this kind of thing before, sir. Only from a distance. They had half a dozen spread out in different places during officers' training."

"Ever seen them used?" Anakin asks, gesturing for two men to stay back as guards. It puts him at three men besides himself. Probably not enough support to take on Count Dooku of all men, unless the injuries incurred on the Invisible Hand had put a significant dent in his dueling capabilities. His jaw sets. Obi-Wan would have been more than enough if Anakin hadn't tripped that sensor on Axxila—

"Not that I remember, sir," Rex says, and that's when the central door opposite the entrance slides open, coming apart in two smooth, efficient halves.

"Ah," says Count Dooku, eyebrows raising. Something dark and metallic falls into his silvery hands with a _thunk._ "A desert rat and his toy soldiers. Here at last, I see. The Republic is so _dreadfully_ behind the times."

And stars help him, Anakin sees the past four years pass by in flashes, remembers death and loss and terror and destruction until it all runs together like the blood of his fellow Padawans on Jabiim, the rain on Kamino, the sightless stares of the dead in a thousand different systems, lost a thousand different banners. Somewhere indelibly marked on his being, on his soul, is the unrest and the unbalance of a galaxy, a universe of terror waiting every time he closes his eyes, and it is all because of this man, standing before him.

Anakin does not think. He barely even blinks. "Dooku," he hisses, igniting his lightsaber. His men fall back in unspoken agreement: _stay alive, keep the jetii alive._ "You're under arrest. In the name of the Galactic Republic."

"Perhaps I should be offended that they've kept sending such a young dog to nip at my heels," Dooku observes, eyes cold and derisive and haughty in a way Obi-Wan, for all his posturing and pretensions of elitism, has never once been. "You know so little of the galaxy, Knight Skywalker. You hardly even know the truth."

"If it's truth from you, I don't need to hear it," Anakin snaps, taking a step forward.

Dooku tilts his head, a slow, elegant motion at odds with the lack of fluidity his advanced age would suggest. He tucks what Anakin only has a moment to recognize as a holocron into a strange-looking pouch at his belt. "No? I suppose you don't need to hear the truth behind the Chancellor's death, then."

Anakin pauses.

Dooku smiles.

"Lie," Anakin says, his heart beating in his mouth. "You're bluffing. The Chancellor suffered a heart attack. Everyone knows that."

For a strange moment, Dooku almost looks _pitying._ "Not even you could possibly be foolish enough to _believe_ that."

"Then tell me what you have to say!" His hand tightens against his lightsaber. The leather of his glove bites into his palm again. The rush of pain brings clarity, however brief, and he uses that to grit his teeth and shove aside the rising fury in his bones. "Cooperation may bring you some degree of clemency in the courts—"

"Spare me," is the bored reply. Keeping the terminal between them, Dooku steps forward and stares Anakin in the eye. "Listen well, then: your precious Chancellor's death was the will of the Force."

* * *

"So, a combat trial?" Lana asks, turning in place from the center of the room to look at Obi-Wan, who stands on the sidelines. She looks at him with wide eyes, thinly-restrained mirth lurking behind them. "Five droids, Master?" Then, clear as day but passing in nature: _Overkill. I'll regret this come the morning._

"The place of a Padawan is to obey," he warns, letting the thought slide past without acknowledgment. She doesn't seem to be aware of what she's doing, or even aware that she's doing anything at all. For all her observational prowess, she appears blind to the fact that her mind is just like his: a durasteel fortress. If anyone has access to it, it's because she wants them there.

That, or the inchoate channel forming in the back of his mind is neither his work nor hers.

Lana ducks her head, a faint smile tugging at her lips. _Kark. Guess he sensed it. Need to stop bothering the pilots late at night and get some real sleep—_ "My apologies, Master."

Obi-Wan raises an eyebrow. "Oh, I'm sure," he says, because so much of his twenties was falling asleep frustrated and waking up to litanies of: _I'm sorry for going podracing against your will, Master, but I used the funds to help out that children's hospital, and the old Twi'lek lunch lady, and sprucing the astromechs up, and what if I made a donation to the Naboo embassy_ —and the present is demanding his attention. He stops himself from sighing at what are now age-old memories. "We'll start with one, and add them in as you progress through the katas. Remember to keep your balance at your center—you're balancing on your toes _right now,"_ he adds, and at his tone Lana rocks back on her heels with a touch of chagrin. "Better. Now, begin."

He waves and one of the droids whirs to life. Lana takes a breath and ignites her 'saber.

The droid attacks, aiming for her knees. She jumps back and nearly stumbles on the landing— _she needs more velocity drills_ , Obi-Wan thinks, raising an eyebrow—but she recovers well enough, sucks in another breath of air, and just as the droid comes at her again—

" _Yes,"_ Lana whispers to herself, eyes glowing. She's caught the upper end of the droid's staff by angling her 'saber perpendicular to its neutral white beams, a painstakingly precise move that is far more Form II than VI, but her grin tells him she's quite forgotten about all of that. "Finally!"

In a split second she whirls away from the bladelock and thrusts her hand out. The Force swells.

The droid crashes into the far wall and lets out an indignant screech as its maglevs reorient it upwards.

Lana coughs. "Sorry," she calls, though Obi-Wan isn't sure if it's meant for him or for the droid.

"We'll add the next one in," he decides. She cuts him a betrayed look. He resists the urge to smile. Her instincts aren't all that bad, really, and in a kinder age she might've had time to develop her forms naturally, but for a Padawan who's never seen battle before, discipline is going to be the most important factor in how she handles any potential fight. "Save the grand improvisations for when you can land that jump, Padawan. A Jedi's primary interest in battle is always defense. Let's do this again, from the beginning."

"Yes, Master," Lana sighs, settling back into the opening stance of Niman.

* * *

Imagine this:

In the world beneath the worlds, the luminous energy field connecting all spirits to one another, the galaxy is shifting.

A gaggle of younglings are playing in one of the Temple gardens, justifications for their candor and energy swirling around in the back of each young mind. They are not strictly allowed to be playing at the present moment, but their carefully-regulated lives have been freed from a rigorous schedule of mandated naps and lessons by some matter that is of enough import to take Ali-Alaan away, and the Padawan who is meant to be watching them has instead decided to volunteer to be their referee.

"Be careful, now," the Padawan says, standing to the side, eyes on the two younglings facing each other with a kind of graceful poise that is too old to belong to children and too young to hide the excitement simmering underneath it. _Maybe this will help them live a little_ , he thinks, scratching at his chin and trying not to hope that the persistent itch just under his jaw is a harbinger of hairy things to come.

One of the younglings settles into a clumsy imitation of the opening stance of Ataru—this girl still bears the vestiges of childhood in the roundness of her face and the comical clash of her high cheeks against her distinctive nose. The girl across from her is already grinning in anticipation, lekku carefully done up behind her back so as to keep them from flying everywhere, the stick she is using in place of a lightsaber held out horizontally, a staff to match her opponent's pretend 'saber.

"Are you ready?" the Padawan asks them. The younglings fall silent. The atmosphere in the garden grows hushed.

He nearly laughs, but thinks better of it in a heartbeat. They treat this moment so seriously, this little mock-duel between their groupmates. If he didn't know any better, he'd think they were seeing it as something sacred.

 _Wonderful thing, the mind of a child is._ If Master Yoda says so, then it must be true.

Two solemn nods bring him back to himself. "Very well, then," he says, crossing his arms. "You may begin."

"I'll never join you," the round-faced girl pipes up, her eyes burning into her opponent with a righteous fire. "I am a Jedi, like my Master before me!"

The Twi'lek girl lets out a high-pitched cackle. "If you won't join me—" She bares her teeth, ferocious and presumably meant to be fearsome. "—then you will die!"

A gasp ripples through the rest of the group. The Padawan smiles. It's a gift they don't know they have, to be so shocked by the first mention of death.

"Oh, I don't think so," the round-faced girl declares, grinning despite herself. The two explode into motion, improvising right and left with wild twirls, inane flourishes, and experimental leaps— _nothing you'd see in a_ real _duel,_ the Padawan thinks. But they're having fun, the rest of the younglings are enthralled, and they seem to enjoy the noise their sticks make when they clash against each other, even though unfamiliarity with the balance of a real stick and not a training 'saber has put them on equal ground.

"Oh—" the Padawan starts when the Twi'lek gets in a lucky blow that sends the round-faced girl sprawling on the grass. She springs up almost immediately with no apparent hurt feelings. He breathes a sigh of relief—

The girl calls on the Force and _leaps._

His heart skips a beat and launches itself into his mouth. It is, he decides, a singularly absurd thing to see an Initiate attempting the iconic Ataru flip, and the shock of it is _clearly_ what keeps him from reacting in time when her fear ripples in the Force with a breathless intensity and she doesn't angle herself properly for the landing.

Clearly. Certainly not a damned impulse to wait and see if she would make it anyways.

The group freezes, watching on as she hits the ground shoulder-first with a pained hiss and rolls right into the feet of Jedi Master Yan Dooku, who looks down at her with a sneer.

"What," he says, looking up and pinning the Padawan with an absolutely frigid look, "is this?"

No one answers. The girl wheezes, but she's too winded to speak.

"Answer a Master when you are asked a question, boy," Dooku snaps, stepping away from the girl.

"It was a mock duel, Master," the Padawan says, swallowing. If _he_ had a beard like that, would it inspire the same mortal terror in others that he feels in his bones at this very moment? "To run their energy off."

"And when this untrained child began to attempt one of the most difficult maneuvers of Form IV, why did you not immediately stop her from doing so and call the duel off?"

Face burning, the Padawan opens his mouth and closes it. _Curiosity_ is about the farthest thing from a proper answer there could be, and he knows it.

"When you have finished with creche duty, you will go straight to your Master and report your negligence. In exhaustive detail." Dooku's tone brooks no argument, and for a moment it looks like that might be the end of it, but he pauses and his eyes go flinty. One of the younglings behind the Padawan stifles a little sob; the Master's irritation simmers around all of them in the Force, a prickly ball of severity that most of them have thus far never had cause to be exposed to. "Take the girl to the medbay. I trust the Healers will educate her on the lunacy of attempting to grandstand when she is hardly past the creche."

He spins on his heel and stalks out of the garden, cape billowing with the motion. The round-faced girl lifts herself up on her arms and brushes her blonde curls out of her face, staring after him with her lips in a thin line and her brow furrowed.

Before the sheer awkwardness in the air suffocates them all, she stands, dusts herself off, gathers her weapon up from where it had hit the ground, and turns to the Twi'lek girl, who has lowered her own weapon.

"Solah," says the round-faced girl, holding the stick out to her opponent. _I surrender._

There is value in choosing one's battles wisely, even as a child. Lana Viszka Ruhr learned her lesson early.


	12. Chapter 12

Daud pulls himself out of the guts of a parked Delta-7B starfighter that some Jedi had brought back all scuffed up and damaged from a skirmish near Sullust. Lana's feet hang in his vision, swinging idly in the air. They're the only two people awake in the hangar. On the far side with the astromechs is a Miralukan Padawan far younger than Lana, snoozing peacefully with an arm slung across a D3 unit, but other than that, the graveyard shift in the Jedi hangar very rarely brings wanderers about. Not with all the Flight Corps Jedi out on the various fronts.

"So, let me get this straight." He sits against the hull with his elbows resting on his knees and looks up at Lana, who's been perched on the opposite fighter's wing for the past standard half-hour. "You're hopping off to Naboo based on a grainy lead one of your comrades managed to pull out of an insane Force-based cult in Hutt Space days before it went dark."

Lana nods. She looks like she hasn't slept in days, and with her irregular schedule, Daud wouldn't be surprised. Maybe that's why this isn't the most coherent explanation he's ever heard from her.

He raises an eyebrow at her. Her eyes are on his face, but they have a faraway cast to them and her vague smile is blatantly tacked on. She's barely listening. "You'll be going to the Chancellor's estate to search for records and documentation about... _something_ , but first you have to negotiate with the Queen over yearly trade deals with the Gungans."

She nods again.

"And it's almost certain that you'll run into this mortal enemy of Master Kenobi's somewhere in the middle of all this?"

"Yes," she says, some indefatigable amusement flashing across her face.

Daud leans forward a little. "Are you stark raving mad, Madame Jedi?"

"Pardon? _Madame Jedi?"_ Startled, she refocuses on him, like she's seeing him for the first time.

"Glad to have you back, _pateesa,"_ he jeers lightly, dropping one knee to the floor and drumming his fingers on the transparisteel engine light cover he'd found cracked half-open in the bowels of the starfighter. He's rewarded with a scowl that makes him smile. Getting any kind of reaction from her beyond vague amusement or irritation feels very nearly like a prize he hadn't known he wanted to win. Lana feels ageless in a way that other Jedi do not, and he still can't quite put his finger on what, exactly, sets her apart from them.

It's like—she walks the earth lightly. Or seems to, anyways, when she zones out on him. In more fanciful moments, he's wondered if it isn't the depths of outer space he sees in her eyes, like she holds the stars in her head and carries every sun and moon with her. That kind of weight is there on her shoulders, at least.

He chalks his inability to tell up to inexperience. Familiarity with the crowd he encounters during transport jobs hardly equates to being able to read a Jedi. To soothe the sting of his jibe, he gives her a gentler smile. "I know all about Gungan trade deals, Lana. They used to take months of political wrangling to come to any kind of accord, but ever since the Battle of Naboo, the proceedings themselves are practically a formality."

"The Battle of Naboo," she murmurs, brows furrowing, and then her eyes widen. "The Battle of Naboo!"

Daud blinks. "The Battle of Naboo," he repeats, uncertainly.

Lana jumps off the fighter and lands between his feet, and the way she looks down at him, backlit by the soft night-mode glow panels lining the hangar, hits him hard and fast. It's her high cheekbones, the planes of her face, the strong bridge of her nose; she reminds him of the statues of the Great Mother of Naboo legend, Mahendré, who brought the heavens down and rearranged them as she liked, who gave both water and fire to the Naboo that they might sustain themselves.

"That was where it was," she's saying. "The first vision I ever had—it was the Battle of Naboo, I think. It had to have been."

"I see," he says. "That's very nice."

"Not really. It was the first time I ever saw death," she says absently, dropping to his side and retrieving her small datapad from where it hangs at her belt. She taps it a few times, fishes the stylus out from its place at the top of the 'pad, and begins writing something down on what looks to be a note-taking program.

Daud glances at her. If she realizes the weight of what she's just said, she makes no indication of it. "I'm going to have to get back under this thing to fix it." He pats the Delta-7B. Newer models may have come out in the past two years, but Jedi pilots are rather strange about their ships—funny, considering how they talk about that whole idea of detachment.

"Alright," she says. Her oversized cloak has slipped past her shoulder, and that's how he knows that she wears a sleeveless tunic and arm guards beneath it. Wonderfully counterintuitive. He wouldn't have expected anything less, really.

"It sounds like you have a big day tomorrow," he hints.

She hums. "More or less."

"Lana," he says, exasperated, and she looks up. He gives her a smile. In any other circumstance he truly wouldn't mind this nosy Jedi girl trying to make him feel at home, but she doesn't seem inclined to look after herself at the moment. Two seconds of consideration lead him to put his hand on her shoulder. "Go get some rest."

Her eyes flicker from his eyes to his hand and then back again. "...I suppose."

"It's good for you. I promise." When he shifts, some of his hair escapes the shaaktail he'd wrangled it into earlier. Her eyes dart to the curl that dangles near his temples with distinct interest, and maybe it's the way her lashes flutter as her gaze shifts that has him remembering where they are and who she is. He drops his hand from her shoulder.

She makes a face he can't quite decipher, isn't sure he should decipher, and she gets to her feet. "Good night, Daud."

"Hey," he calls after her, and she stops, looking at him over her shoulder. "Come again when you're done? I want to hear all about your trip."

She turns away, but not before he sees the smile on her face. "I'll think about it."

He finds himself watching her until she disappears through the doorway. Only when she is gone does he think to let out the breath he's been holding and carefully slide himself back under the Delta-7B.

"Stars," he mutters to himself, setting the hydrospanner down after a half-hearted attempt to keep working. He glares at the malfunctioning engine. "I'm in trouble, aren't I?"

* * *

"That's impossible," Anakin says after a ringing moment of silence. "I would've sensed it."

"Like Master, like Padawan. You know as well as I do that the Force is clouded," Dooku returns with far too much smugness, striding to the obelisk and tapping several buttons.

Holographic information screens spring to life—Anakin has an absurd impression of a museum information desk for a moment—and, ignoring the way Anakin and his men are strung tight like live wires waiting to go off, Dooku brings up three pictures of what might be space installations with a flourish. They're dark and grainy with bad contrast dissolving distinguishable lines into off-whites and vaguely patterned greys, like they were taken with a holocorder in an opera theater.

 _Is this one of those mind healer tests?_ Anakin wonders, keeping a careful eye on Dooku.

For his part, Dooku steps back with a grim smile. "However, certain investigations reveal its will well enough. Behold where all that funding disappeared to—research facilities like this one in the Unknown Regions. Your Chancellor's activities only proved my point, boy. The Republic is grossly decadent—it is bowed under the weight of its ages, grown senile and insensate. The only way for the galaxy to move forward is by shedding that legacy!"

"The Republic has brought order to the galaxy for thousands of years! It's a force for good—for _justice—"_

Even as he says them, the words taste like ash in his mouth.

"Do you still insist upon that after you laid waste to Geonosis and Axxila?" Dooku asks, leaning forward. "After the reports were published about the Republic's gross misallocation of funding for unprotected systems affected by the war? Rogue One has been a very thorough reporter. The galaxy can see the statistics for themselves. They are capable of being honest. Unlike the Jedi."

He feels Rex's uneasy gaze at his back. Not a bad thought on Rex's part, not after all these years. Something unsteady thrums in his veins and beats in time with his heart, a pulsing thread of doubt he'd been nursing since the day he'd nearly killed Dooku, ignoring in the hope that it would leave him if he only pretended it wasn't there.

"Maybe so," Anakin says, "but you'll hear similar things about the CIS from them and Kel Doraniq. Say what you will, Count, but I am a Jedi. I will not equivocate on my beliefs based on a single word from an enemy!"

Dooku is once more standing in the shadow of the large door he came from, and his eyes glint in the dark as he observes Anakin. "The conflict in you has split your spirit to the bone," he says at last, sounding pleased, and Anakin jolts, because he hadn't even felt Dooku poking around. _Blast this planet._ "You are no more Jedi than I am Sith, boy. Mark my words: it will destroy you before the end, that conflict. I would be immensely satisfied to witness it."

 _That's it,_ Anakin decides, swallowing past his dry mouth and ignoring the ring of certainty in Dooku's voice. He ignites his 'saber. "This conversation is over."

"Indeed," Dooku agrees.

Before Anakin can react, Dooku raises a metallic hand. The Force _roars._ Anakin cries out, falling to his knees, and the sensation of his bones jolting against the cold metal floor is the last thing that makes sense before something ominous and old rolls in and saturates the very air of the room like a roiling tide of rot and fog. His world spirals into diaphanous beams of light, shot through with bands of darkness, and he knows no more.

* * *

Padmé glances at her bedroom door, then at the rest of her room. Luke and Leia are curled up together on the sleek diamond-patterned bedsheet like little tookas, watching her with curious eyes. She stands from her desk and goes to the control panel, flipping open the cover.

"Always check twice," she tells her children, unlocking and then locking the door. "You can do that for Mommy, can't you?"

Luke makes an agreeable noise, though she's sure he's only really reacting to her tone of voice. Leia's nose scrunches, like the thought of security is particularly offensive to her sensibilities.

"You're just like your father," Padmé informs Leia. She bends over the both of them to tweak her daughter's nose. Leia giggles, covering her nose with her hands, and Padmé brushes kisses over her forehead, then Luke's. Little hands grab at her ruffled blouse as she pulls back, and she looks down to see Luke blinking up at her, the beginnings of an uncertain frown pulling at his lips. She smiles. "I'll be just over there. I have some work to do, after all."

Luke doesn't stop frowning, but he does let go. It's enough.

Seated again at the desk, Padmé takes a deep breath before reaching over and turning on the holorecorder. "My dear friend," she says into the recorder, posture upright, slipping back into the Queenly monotone that had been required of her on Naboo as easily as breathing. "Years ago, you and I fought side-by-side to assure a better future for our peoples. Though now we are separated by state as well as time, there are some things that we still share: our desire to make the galaxy a better place has remained with you, as it has with me. With this in mind, I beg you to listen to my plea..."

It's a practice round, this recording. She'll go over it later with Sabé to make the necessary adjustments to her posture, her tone, her inflection—perhaps even her gown, because Coruscanti formalwear is dazzling at the best of times, but it is also far too easy for it to be misconstrued as inauthentic. Leia giggles out of the blue. Padmé pauses in the middle of a sentence, glancing back with a finger on the holorecorder's pause button, but all she sees is Luke curled into Leia's side, snoozing while Leia observes the proceedings with distinct interest.

 _You like my dress?_ Padmé ventures to put out in the realm of her thoughts, feeling very foolish as she tries to recall what Anakin and Obi-Wan had been trying to piece together about common practices in the Jedi creche. Force-sensitive children like being talked to through the Force—a handful and a half, especially when she doesn't have the benefit of being able to tune into the same thing they can with such raw aptitude. But Leia gives her a beautiful baby grin, as if in response to the thought, and Padmé smiles in return. _Maybe you'll wear it someday, my little shooting star._

If she can pull this off, perhaps one day, Leia will have time to grow into her dresses and choose her path in life when she's well and ready. Padmé turns back to the desk and draws in a breath like her old, crumbling diction coach back on Naboo had taught her and Sabé to do every time they practiced a speech.

"I humbly request your aid in calling for peace talks, Duchess Kryze. Your people say _haatyc or'arue jate'shya ori'sol aru'ike nuhaatyc_ in situations like this, and I suspect that it has never held more true than in this. I pray that the shadow that has fallen over the galaxy will be lifted by our actions in the coming years."

* * *

"As you command, sir," the clone trooper in charge of the navicomp calculations says after a distinct pause. "I'll input the coordinates immediately. To... Ahch-To."

Yoda nods and stumps off the bridge, unbothered by the vague sense of uncertainty hanging in the Force. His men are far too professional to actually voice their doubts, but he is not old for nothing. Dubious concern on young faces is simply part and parcel to his existence, as are the unguarded, incredulous thoughts drifting through the Force that he was almost certainly not intended to hear, judging by the way they question his sanity. When he is safely in his quarters, he chuckles to himself. "Youth's vagaries. Young again, to be."

This is not the first time he has taken these men out in search of old Jedi wisdom, but it is the first time he has ventured this far into the Unknown Regions with them in tow.

Qui-Gon's words, spoken to him in the silence of his mind, echo now as the dreadnought jolts into hyperspace and settles in for a long wait. _There is an island there, a locus for the Force—Jedi inhabited it before even your time. You search for the source of those visions, do you not? If you go, you will find something there that you need to know._

Yoda hums and reaches for the Force.

* * *

"Say, Master Kenobi," Lana starts as she settles beside him in the copilot's chair with an open ration pack in her hands. She takes a bite of the completely tasteless gunk the Temple has the guff to refer to as "food" and chews with an unfazed expression—an act of bravery far more impressive than anything he's ever done, really. She swallows. "Darth Maul—who is he, anyways?"

Oh, boy.

Obi-Wan sighs, sitting back in the pilot's chair and pulling his robes closer about himself. Space is cold, and he suspects that the thermostat panel in the cockpit is malfunctioning—he's turned it up to its highest setting, but it's certainly not getting any warmer. "Seeing as you seem to have read half the Archives in three years, I'm sure you could tell me."

"Oh, I don't know about that. First-hand accounts are so much more exciting than dry mission reports," she returns with such sincerity that he almost feels like a cad for being snarky about it. _Almost,_ because when he glances at her she's fighting back a small smile and there's a cunning gleam in her eyes that might or might not be the blue lights from the control panel. _Cheeky._

"If I recall correctly, those dry mission reports contained ample quantities of first-hand accounts," he says, folding his hands over his belly. "After all, I wrote most of them. Dryly."

"Did I say that? A thousand apologies." Her smile is winning and unrepentant.

He raises a brow. "An apology won't do, I'm afraid. It's your turn to answer a question, Padawan."

Her smile fades. "Shoot," she says. He's heard warmer invitations from men holding blasters to his head.

"Where do you come from?" he asks. She gives him a _look._ He raises a quelling hand. "Yes, we all come from the Force. That's not what I meant."

She stares at the shimmering illusion of realspace over Coruscant he'd set over the viewport as soon as their course was set for hyperspace. "Mandalore," she says eventually, the humming of the ship's engine and the play of various lights from all around the cockpit lending her expression a pensive cast. "Master Vos and Knight Secura found me on Mandalore."

Obi-Wan nods. "I thought so. You remember it still?"

The shrug he gets in return is jerky and looks physically uncomfortable, like she's trying to prevent herself from overreaching with the motion and has ended up too far in the opposite direction. "Not much. I was six—I know that's older than most. But there were... circumstances. What about you, Master?"

"Stewjon," he says. "I was found at age three, though. I'm afraid I don't recall anything about it aside from the name."

Lana glances at him, then, another tiny smile pulling at the corners of her lips. Silent laughter dances in her eyes. "I can't imagine you as a three-year-old."

An image of a copper-haired toddler with a full, bushy beard and a pinched expression floats across his consciousness. "Very funny," he says, giving her a droll look as she shifts to tuck her feet into the arm of the copilot's chair.

"No, truly," she insists, doing an admirable job of concealing her surprise. She flutters one hand in the air. "It's... ubiquitous. To the Kenobi look. What would you look like without it?"

"An excellent question. The answer will, tragically, remain a mystery." He strokes his chin, trying very hard to forget all the times he'd been stopped at all sorts of doors to present his ID long before he'd made the decision to grow the beard out. Lana, in a blatant violation of the second sacred rule that all Jedi younglings learn from the creche, sticks her tongue out at him. Obi-Wan coughs to disguise his sudden laughter at the thought of Jar-Jar that springs to mind.

"...Say," Lana says, pausing right after an offended snort. Slow realization is dawning on her face. "Did you, ah, happen to _think_ that, by any chance?"

 _Now you notice,_ he returns, a casual observer of the complicated interplay of emotions that cross her face. _It seems the Force is at work between us, Padawan Ruhr._

 _That's... that's wonderful,_ is the reply. Her eyes are just slightly too wide and her hands have disappeared into the folds of her sleeves, where they are twisting the fabric from the inside. Strange look in the shadows the comfortable dim casts on her cloak.

Obi-Wan takes pity on her. "Get some rest," he says, waving her off. "You'll be better off the more you get."

Lana goes without argument, her thoughts an indeterminable whirlwind reeling themselves in and away from the fortress of his mind the further she gets from the cockpit.

Occupied by his own thoughts, it takes Obi-Wan several hours to realize that they'd both dodged each other's initial questions.

 _I deserve this,_ he decides, running a weary hand over his face.

* * *

 **pateesa - Huttese. Slang; a mildly teasing/insulting way to say "friend", and, in some circumstances, "darling". Spacers tend to use it casually.**

 **haatyc or'arue jate'shya ori'sol aru'ike nuhaatyc - Mando. "Better one big enemy that you can see than many small ones that you can't"; a proverb.**

 **Thanks to tomockingbird for reading through this beforehand.**


	13. Chapter 13

Rex frowns when Kix emerges from the medical tent and shakes his head. Evening is falling over Jakku—soon enough their encampment will start their night duties, but Rex's primary task for the past two hours was to stand guard outside the medical tent. That the task was self-appointed is _rather beside the point,_ as General Kenobi might say.

"Nothing?" he asks his _vod,_ dismayed.

"There's nothing physically wrong with him that I didn't already know about." Kix glances back at the tent. "I think it's _jetii_ stuff, sir. All the instruments were screwy. Did Count Dooku try anything obvious?"

He pauses. "Define obvious, soldier. _Jetii_ stuff is tricky."

"Like... hand-waving, holding up objects of power, talking about his master plan..."

"I don't think there were any artifacts this time, but it's hard to remember. Getting thrown against the wall will do that to you." At the admission, Kix gets a pinched look on his face. Rex quickly steps back, recognizing that expression from a thousand different battlefields. "Let's make sure our commander isn't going to keel over before we take care of my injuries. It's nothing significant—I remember that Dooku showed off his shiny new hands before it all went to kark. Seems like hand-waving and _jetii_ stuff if you consider the other yahoos the General's been up against."

"You're not getting out of treatment," Kix informs him, like he's talking about the weather and not a sustained invasive medical patdown. "I've done what I can to ensure the steadiness of his vitals, but when I say screwy instruments, I mean the scanner he put together very nearly exploded in my hands. I won't be able to see the full extent of any internal damage from the impact of the fall until Sparky's got a moment to fix it, but he shouldn't be in any immediate danger."

Rex nods. At this point, the Skywalker Protocol is a law unto itself: _the General_ will _knock himself out, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Just make sure he can bounce back._ "We'll wait the night out. Monitor him. If he doesn't get up on his own by morning, I'll execute Plan B."

"Good luck with that, boss. Now come in so I can check on how bad your concussion is." With that, Kix turns and heads back into the tent, clearly expecting Rex to follow. Instead, he hesitates at the flap and looks out past the camp at Jakku's sand dunes, cast in tones of orange and red and gold by the setting sun.

 _Fulcrum won't be happy if she's needed,_ he admits to himself, and for one moment lets his lips thin. _But this plan has to work out. There has to be a place for us_ vod _after the war, too._

* * *

A dream, winding through forgotten hyperlanes that were once chartered by humble merchants looking for a new home in a time before the Rakatan Empire took root in the galaxy and changed history forever:

The ruined palace she finds herself in is built out of warm-toned imported quarry meteorite from a small planet near Bothawui, punctuated by natively-hewn facades of blue-green stones larger than a man's head, stretching high up into fathomless ceilings built in an age before durocrete or technological innovations that rendered structural integrity a nonfactor on planets with weaker gravity wells.

Her breath comes in crystalline puffs and she knows without looking that the land mass outside the walls is a snowy, inhospitable, broken waste, howling with the legacy of loss and forlorn isolation, the kind of place you only go if you're looking to hide something. Or hide _from_ something.

Lana glides toward the throne at the end of the hall, at once conscious of and helpless to stop the inexorable pull she feels toward it. It is gilded with stardust-infused Toruvian gemsteel, wrought by long-dead artisans who were once sought across every known star system, and its back is fashioned in the shape of the planet's two moons. Every crater and crevice present in the twin heralds of Kalevala's night has been painstakingly outlined in silver, perfect replicas of imperfect planetoids, one moon encircling the other in a representation of their mismatched orbits.

"This is where I was happy," a woman's voice says from behind her, strong and clear. Just like every time this happens, Lana draws in an involuntary breath. It's like waiting to be struck across the face, she thinks, a sort of breathless familiarity with the moment before the end. "This is where I loved him."

In the back of her mind, the fledgling connection to a source she only half-remembers sings in harmony with the minor-key melody threaded into the very bones of this place. If she weren't caught in her silence, transfixed by the throne she knows hides several blasters and a travel-sized medkit within its chest cavity, she likes to believe that she would summon up the willpower to close up the already-tenuous valve connecting her to the now, to the galaxy outside her mind. It has no place here.

"You're gone. Let me be," Lana says for the first time, closing her eyes as the world stutters to a stop about her.

There is a silence—an interruption of the song, an unsatisfactory halt, an abrupt rest in the middle of a low note.

"No." The voice is tender and compassionate. "I am not gone from you. Not never. I will not leave you, Lana Viszka Ruhr."

Lana whirls to face the intruder with a glare, but the palace folds in on itself like sheets of shattered glass in the span of a moment; all she catches before she opens her eyes is a blur of blonde and the smallest smile on pale lips.

New. Different. A more direct approach.

The Force must think she doesn't get the point. If it thinks at all—if it isn't just a nebulous energy field connecting the universe together, strung up at every star in the galaxy with woven threads of light that coalesce into a wall, a wall that goes on forever at the end of all things—

 _Stop,_ she tells herself, and for the most part, she succeeds.

Alone in the crew's quarters aboard the discreet _Linear_ -class transport corvette, with the thermostat set to a sane temperature and the blankets pooled around her legs, she stares at the darkened ceiling in unsettled silence.

 _What are you doing to me?_ she asks the Force, too aware of the way it hums within arm's length, the way it rests even in the turning of machinery beneath the floorboards and fills up every empty space. It _sings_ to her. She shies away, turning her back to the room, curling up against the wall. If Master Yoda were here, he would scold her for it. But he isn't, and she thinks she might be on the edge of panic as she finishes the thought: _What are you turning me into?_

On Coruscant, where it had been dimmed and muted by the sheer volume of noise, the Force had been playing in the background instead of blaring in her face like it is at present. She had been able to ignore the discomfort of being constantly aware of everything around her. Somewhere between childhood and adolescence, she had forgotten those early, desolate years off-planet, where she had never had to ask after anyone's location or intentions—the Force had simply presented it to her, handed it over unwrapped, blunt truth staring a little girl who had never been ready for it in the face.

But now, with the passage of the years, with the struggle of accessing it only as the Jedi taught her to, the way it floods through her feels almost like the strike across the face she'd been waiting for earlier.

 _Master Jinn, if you have an explanation for this, I would be truly appreciative_ , she casts out with hope, and receives no response. Always only ever the Force, humming with the haunting melody of hyperspace in motion. It is nearer to her than it has been in years, staying even when she makes a half-hearted swipe to draw it too close to her and perhaps see it push away from her once again in response.

Lana presses her hands over her ears, screws her eyes shut, and loosens her hold on the Force. It will not be pushed and it will not be pulled—but perhaps it can be ignored. "Emotion, yet peace," she murmurs, just for the sake of hearing something else in the room. "Ignorance, yet knowledge. Passion, yet serenity..."

* * *

They arrive at Theed in the middle of the night, and Lana watches the warm glow of the city lights meander past the transparisteel viewport with a sobriety that has Obi-Wan giving her a furtive glance as he guides their ship to the public landing platform the sleepy-sounding space traffic control had directed them toward. The quiet is broken by the beeping of her datapad as it reconnects to the HoloNet.

"That's strange," Lana mutters, pulling it out of her cloak. The backlit screen bathes her face in a rapidly pulsing red light—some kind of notification, if he had to guess. Her lips thin. "Not that I doubted you, Master Kenobi, but Darth Maul is definitely on-planet. The holos are from a settlement on the west side of the biggest mountain range. Does he always look that angry?"

"Probably angrier." He—doesn't _hesitate_ , exactly, but he isn't exactly out of touch with Intel, and he knows the kinds of holos Lana seems to have a ready pool of at any given moment are far less common on the HoloNet than a casual user of it would think. "Where are you finding all these images?"

She shrugs. Once again he finds it a jerky, awkward motion, like in any other circumstance she'd be using her bony elbows as weapons. "I rigged this datapad to trawl HoloNet boards and news outlets and compile the information together. It puts all the holos at the top of each report, for the sake of expedience."

Wait.

What?

"That tiny datapad?" Obi-Wan asks as he curves the ship around a tall spire stretching out from a large building. The concept itself isn't terribly exceptional, though he is _very_ curious as to why Lana decided she needed to have that kind of information feed. What currently demands more of his attention is this: she programmed it herself. "Wouldn't something of that scale require a heavy-duty processor?"

Surprise flickers through her signature, then a strange sense of _something_ he can't quite get a handle on. Embarrassment? No, that doesn't seem quite right. She shifts in her seat and picks at the flight straps. "You'd think so," she says, "but it's amazing what you can do with some insomnia and access to the Sentinel astromech lab."

"You don't have access to the Sentinel astromech lab," he informs her. He'd know—Master Yoda had given him access to her full profile in the data records, including the list of doors she has access to, and none of the technician labs that the Temple houses are on that list. It had only been after their jaunt through the Chancellor's apartments that he'd begun to suspect that she was a menace to any and all technical restrictions that anyone attempted to place on her.

Her preference for Makashi in dueling had surprised him at first. She already moves through life like she's a ghost, walking in some waking dream she's never quite gotten ahold of—but that belies the sharp mind behind her demeanor. In light of what he knows now, there almost couldn't be a better choice.

"I don't," she agrees. There's a smug note in her voice. She fiddles with her too-long Padawan braid, then flicks it back over her shoulder.

Very carefully, Obi-Wan does not sigh. "I trust I do not need to remind you again, Padawan, that a Jedi's finest virtue is humility."

"Donthon Tetha says it is anonymity." The response is sharp, immediate, and very, very sly.

"We know Donthon Tetha's name," he returns, because two can play at this game, and he is the more skilled competitor. "As well as very nearly the entire body of his work, of which there are vast quantities. I think it is safe to say that it was certainly not _his_ highest virtue."

Lana stamps a booted foot on the floor. It makes a loud _clack_ sound; she glances at it for a moment and carefully tucks it underneath her instead. "Curses. I've been foiled again."

All she's going to get in response to that is a dry, censuring look, and as he turns back to the flight controls he realizes it is the same look Anakin earned every five minutes when he was between the ages of thirteen and sixteen.

 _Truly, this is my lot in life,_ he thinks, for a brief moment meeting his own eyes in his reflection on the viewport.

A moment to breathe, then a return to business. He keeps his attention on their descent, absently working his jaw to pop his ears as they undergo the final landing patterns. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a strange tension tugs at him. Nothing _seems_ to be wrong, but even so, what if? Manufacturers these days aren't always picky about the materials they use, and improperly-purified selenium has a tendency to blow out instruments if you so much as bump them. Even astromechs can't fix melted selenium alloys.

 _Thank you for that knowledge, Anakin._

He checks the ship diagnostics twice before he is forced to admit that nothing is wrong. Lana glances at him, bemused, but doesn't comment.

Obi-Wan exhales the air from his lungs _slowly._ He isn't using a breathing exercise. He's just—breathing. Slowly. And with purpose.

For once in his life, the landing is uneventful.

Only when he sits back and glance out the viewport does he realize that they've docked in the very same platform that the then _Queen_ Amidala's royal starcruiser had landed on nearly fifteen years ago, bearing a ragtag band of misfits out to break a planetary blockade because of one girl's stubbornness.

He's already braced himself for the memory by the time it hits, and so it feels less like being punched in the gut and more like being slapped in the face.

How _young_ he had been, that Padawan Kenobi, a man in his prime without a single sign of the beard he would one day carefully cultivate to hide that youthful jawline. He had been the one to initiate the age-old exchange between them: _I sense that there is something else here at work in all this. Something—elusive._

 _Keep your mind on the present moment, Padawan, in the here and now._ In his memory Qui-Gon's eyes are crinkled with age and a pride he had never understood, colored blue-grey by the soft overheads of the starcruiser.

Less than twenty-four hours later, Obi-Wan held him in his arms as he died under the floor of the Nubian royal palace, desperate for a promise he had already received without asking for it.

"So this is Theed." Lana's remark is a shade away from neutral, but her eyes flicker in his direction before she is suddenly examining the skyline as she stands from her seat and stretches. "It's very... different. From anywhere I've been before."

"I'd imagine so. There isn't anywhere near as much greenery on Coruscant, much less outside the walls of Sundari," Obi-Wan returns, standing and gesturing for her to leave the cockpit. His joints crack as he does so.

 _I'm getting old,_ he thinks ruefully as Lana lets out an amused little snort at his misfortune and pads her way out of the cramped room. _And I am still beset by the very same issue that plagued me as a young man._

 _Truly, it is time that makes fools of us all._


	14. Chapter 14

_I won't leave you._

 _Not this time._

Ahsoka Tano leans back in her seat, arms crossed, staring out at the forested surface of Takodana from her starfighter without really seeing it. Her call with Rex has just ended. For the first time since she'd woken up after leaving that world between the worlds, she feels the heavy shroud of the Cosmic Force settle on her shoulders, weighty and austere.

But she is no Jedi. She has walked too far along a different path.

"Oh, Anakin," she whispers into the silence. Not _Skyguy._ Nor _Master,_ either. In her world, he hasn't been that for a long, long time. "Why is it always you?"

* * *

Lana wakes to the sound of rain.

 _What's this?_ she thinks, bemused, but when she opens her eyes and sees the intricate Nabooian designs inlaid on the ceiling in bronze and gold, she remembers. _Right. Negotiations._

Though she's relatively certain she isn't caught in another waking vision— _that's_ happened before, and had been very difficult to explain to anyone but the Healers—she still can't discount the possibility when she's on this planet. She sits up and makes a face at the wall. After a moment of thought, she stands and feels along the length of it. Its panels and the designs on those (draigons, she notes) make the search difficult, but sure enough, her fingers stop on the feel of durasteel mesh, tiny and flexible.

With a deft motion she plucks the tiny microphone from the corner panel nearest the lush bed she'd been ushered to by one of Queen Jamilla's handmaidens. She tosses it onto the floor and very nearly crushes it with her foot; after a moment she picks it up again and leans out the window to stick it onto the outside wall.

It may be routine to bug the guest rooms in any political residence, but that doesn't mean she has to like it. She left the one on the ceiling, anyways.

"Good morning," she tells it as she slips her oversized cloak back on, eyes fixed on the rain falling outside her window. From her spot next to her bed she can see Theed laid out under grey skies that only grow darker as they linger near the mountains in the distance. A few ships are hovering near the public spaceport, but most are either docked or coming and going with little fanfare. Naboo's rainy days are unusually temperate for planets with water cores, but no one wants to chance the weather getting worse—whether out of respect for Mahendré-who-brought-life or more secular reasons, like the wear and tear that the elements wreak upon more delicate ships.

Like Nabooian royal starcruisers. Lana glances at the door to the guest sitting room, where she can feel Obi-Wan in a deep meditation she knows better than to disturb. While his shields stay as firm as they ever do—and how strange it is, to once more be so aware of a teacher's mind, like it's a part of yours instead of background murmur—some things are floating through despite her best attempts to keep her own shields on par. Maybe it's the visions. Maybe some part of his memories can recognize what he himself seems to keep missing, preoccupied as he is by war and death and the slow, creeping feeling of having been a part of something that has been wrong for longer than you've ever been alive.

She sighs, and if her reflection in the windowpane is weary, she's the only one around to see it.

Nothing is scheduled to happen until the evening, as the Naboo had insisted upon. Obi-Wan gave the requisite amounts of protest, and from him the objections were probably genuine, but he clearly hadn't accounted for how much of a hero the Naboo had come to see him as in the years since Queen Amidala became Senator Amidala. Judging by the way Queen Jamilla had been smiling at him, Lana's willing to bet that they've got nearly free reign of the palace while they're here.

She's never been one to pass up a good opportunity.

Taking care not to jostle Obi-Wan or his awareness as she passes by, she sidles through the sitting room and into the grand hall lined with what looks like dozens of doors identical to theirs. There's a stillness in the air that comes not from unlivedness but from the weight of ages lining the supporting beams of the ceiling and the pillars bearing their weight, grand and golden under the warm lights near every door that all look to be recent installs. Lana hums to herself and starts walking, not entirely successful in ignoring the fact that the sound that comes out is a reflection of the Force as it swirls in gentle eddies around the city.

It moves with the water, unlike Coruscant, where it stubbornly persists. Like a flower in a wasteland. Prior to the war, Master Yoda would often liken the manifestation of the Force to the senses as a series of songs, all variations on a shared theme, all ultimately pointing to the same thing.

Out of the corner of her eye, there is a flicker of movement. She glances out the wide archway that leads into one of the palace's many gardens. A woman wearing the uniform of the palace guard is leaning against the wall of a patio with an overhang; her eyes are on the rain, at once both seeing and unseeing, caught in some untold memory that bleeds into the trees and the bushes. There is something familiar about it—then she sees a flash of a man's grin, the sensation of being very small and tugging on dark curls, strong hands keeping her high up in the sky—

Lana hastily withdraws her consciousness, tucking her hands into her sleeves in order to squeeze her upper arms in retribution. Again the uncomfortable childhood sensation of knowing what was not meant to be known presents itself, the curling, sinking feeling in her stomach, the sensation of being trapped by private thoughts she hadn't meant to notice. Her sudden upset prompts a pulse of awareness from Obi-Wan; embarrassed, she locks down her thoughts and steps back in order to leave.

But the motion has alerted the other woman to her presence. She locks eyes with Lana. "Greetings, Master Jedi," she calls over the rain. "How goes it?"

"I'm an apprentice," Lana calls back.

"Thus we all are," is the agreement, and then the woman makes her way out of the alcove, unhurried by the rain. She comes to a stop a polite few feet away from Lana, glancing at her rough-spun cloak. Lana consciously loosens her fingers as the woman speaks. "Is it that cold for off-worlders? It's been getting chillier, but not enough for us to break out our winter uniforms just yet."

She shrugs, taking the nicety for what it is. She can do niceties. Meaningless nothings so often have little tidbits of information stored away inside them—implications, inflections, what the speaker doesn't know. Managing social niceties is a very useful skill for diplomats and spies alike. "I don't know about _cold._ Coruscant is ostensibly regulated to be temperate for all species by the planetary weather control system."

"My brother says the same thing, but he's a spacer. He's used to cold." The woman shifts, a question in her eyes, and Lana tilts her head in response. She's got a feeling about what she's going to say, anyways. The memory she saw is indication enough. "But, ah... he recently sent word that he was hired by the Jedi. You wouldn't happen to have met Daud Antema, would you? New pilot?"

"We've met," Lana confirms, a small smile crossing her face as she thinks about their chats in the hangar bay. The woman gives her a funny look. Lana forces the impassive Jedi mask back on, all neutral features and unhurried decorum, and has to fight not to laugh at the suspicion that remains in her new friend's demeanor. _Maintain the Jedi reputation, right. Ascetics. Monks. Strange adherents to a little-understood religion._ "I helped him settle into his duties. I take it you're one of his sisters?"

"Elisa Antema, at your service. I was worried about him, so it's good to hear that someone looked out for him. It's a pleasure to meet you, Madame Jedi." Elisa snaps off a playful salute.

 _Madame Jedi. Yes, she's definitely related,_ Lana thinks, dry, and bows in return. "Please, call me Lana."

"Lana Viszka Ruhr?" Elisa guesses. There's something shrewd in her eyes that Lana can only think of as trouble.

"That's me," she says, cautiously.

"You're the one I've heard so much about. Fascinating." Elisa observes her with a renewed interest and a calm smile. Lana feels rather like she's been plunged headfirst into a game she hadn't known she was about to be playing, and while it is very, very tempting to blame it on the cosmos, she can only attribute her misstep to her own lack of wariness. "What brings you outside your rooms at this early hour? I hear the Jedi are very strict about their morning meditations."

"Well, there are many different forms of meditation. Sitting and centering one's self is the most common—as a major technique, it dates back to the time before the Ruusan Reformation, and it's certainly not exclusive to the Jedi—but I'm currently engaging in a form of moving meditation. Synchronizing myself with the Force." Lana waves her hand. "You know. Through motion."

That she's also learning the layout of the palace in the event of an emergency is a side benefit to wandering around in a very tenuous communion with the cosmic energy field that binds them all together.

Elisa nods. "Sounds interesting. And where are you headed?"

"Somewhere," Lana says, a smile threatening to break through her impassive mask at the flat look that gets her. "I go where the Force leads. It's everywhere, but sometimes, that's less like it's sitting in one place and more like it's... flowing. Like water. I find those currents easiest to grasp when I'm trying to tap into the Force."

"So it's always in motion?" Elisa asks. She gestures for Lana to keep on down the hall and falls into step beside her.

For a blessedly brief moment, the end of the hall ahead of them flickers—a bright, all-encompassing light begins to flood through the wide entryway before it ceases and fades away, leaving behind only the central atrium of the palace building with the tall fountain decorated by statuettes of the queens of Naboo. The Force murmurs for a moment, a burbling brook winding its way through the foundations of Theed, a winding ouroboros thread without beginning and lacking an end.

Lana blinks the remnants of the light out of her eyes, left only with the blistering certainty that this moment, framed by gentle rain and the cool metal of the fountain, is nothing less than the calm before the storm. "You could say that."

* * *

The fact of the matter is that somewhere out there in the galaxy, Dooku still exists.

If Yoda felt charitable, he would ascribe his mood to the vagaries of a creaky old age filled with too many stairs; as it is, however, he has foregone scuttling about as a youngling would perhaps prefer in favor of settling on an outcropping of rock overlooking the vast, furious seas of Ahch-To. His men wait over the planet; to the far side of the island, on one of the few flat spaces, two of the younger ones—age is relative with clone troopers, but their spirits cannot hide—are inside the shuttle that had gotten him to the surface. They're playing holochess with an old board bartered from a young Besalisk on the last trading post they'd refueled at before venturing into the Unknown Regions.

Such trouble young people get into. Century after century, and they never change.

Yoda lets out a sigh and rests his staff across his knees. The oceans whirl, and there is life in their depths.

Far away and very near, the future he has seen through so many different eyes calls out to him through the Force. It resonates in the earth, the rocks, the seas, the homes of the Caretakers; this ancient place, old before he was young, sings in harmony with the song of the universe, as so few places in the galaxy now do.

Yes, this is where he was meant to come. This is where the Force wants him. He had been to Ahch-To once, centuries before, when the hyperlanes were different and technological innovation did not allow for expedited jumps across the galaxy, but it had nothing to show him then.

Now, with his last formal Padawan on his mind and the air fraught with the cosmic undertones of destiny and probability, he is ready to receive the message and the message will not present itself.

"Too old for this, I am," Yoda tells the waters and the rocks and the Force, humming between it all. He only half-means it, preoccupied as he is by the stinging memory of his failure with the boy he'd raised from childhood, by the twists and turns and the agony of a galaxy at war as it has not been in millennia.

This is when he hears it:

 _Life._

It's a woman's voice, young and accented, almost like Padawan Ruhr's—another of his tragic line, so gifted in the Unifying Force that they walk among sentients and see not faces but souls. Luminous beings in the midst of darkness; guiding beacons in the midst of light. Dooku had been no exception.

Yoda stills and wills his spirit to settle, closing his eyes and reaching out. It is an act of selflessness, giving away control to something that is other. He empties his mind. He is a student once more, Grandmaster still, but Padawan eternally, and it is his place to listen. The Force comes readily, as it has not in so long, and the voice grows stronger, firmer.

 _Death and decay..._

He sees the tapestry that is every star and sun and moon, every planetoid and planet and gas giant, woven through with Light, shot through with streaks of Darkness. He sees the wounds of Sullust and Mygeeto and Kashyyyk laid out like rips and frays, tears in the fabric, a diaspora of countless lives floating in the vacuum of space, all victims of a cause that had been lost somewhere near Kamino when one man looked into the future and surrendered to fear.

 _...that feeds new life._

Light interspersed by warm shadows, the laughter of children in a garden that could be one in the Temple. A man looking across an open plain with hope in his eyes. For one fleeting moment, a young woman surrounded by floating boulders, her hand outstretched—but she is gone quickly, far more quickly than the other images, and in her place is a shabby Corellian freighter, hurtling through space at a breakneck speed near the Maw Cluster, shaving parsecs of distance to pass it faster, going on toward some unknown purpose—but not a terrible one, of that he is sure. A reckless one, perhaps. He has known very few who would willingly get that close to the Maw.

 _Warmth._

Twin suns, setting over a dusty desert ridge. Yoda frowns.

Tatooine. He knows that, at least. But before he can think on it further, she speaks again.

 _Cold._

The world turns on its head. Now it is night, and he stands in a jungle, surrounded by old stone temples, massive trees, and the silence of the dark. At the edge of the treeline stands a shadowy figure who does not recoil from his presence, but smiles, slow and sure.

"How old you have become," it says, a warped echo, five different voices melding into one. Yoda hears Dooku most of all, and the stake of guilt that seeks his heart is nothing like any other he has felt. "So set in your ways that you can no longer see what the whole galaxy once knew. _J'us shiyi zûtazihri tu'iyia qo, Jidai._ How delicious—the Jedi themselves, they have lost the—"

 _Balance,_ the young woman, the young _Jedi,_ whispers in awe.

 _An energy. A Force._

He sees her sitting here, a wild man standing beside her as an instructor might wait for a student to complete a problem. Her hand is stretched out, the same as his. She is the same woman who lifted the rocks. Younger, somehow, in spirit, but undoubtedly the same. An answering smile unfurls in the very bones of this place, how long, how long it has been waiting to be heard—

 _Together,_ a man is saying, desperation in his voice, _together, we could rule the galaxy. It's time to let old things die._

 _Rey._

 _Please._

Yoda's eyes open. He sits on the rock, still and unmoving, as if he himself were stone. His joints are stiff enough for the petrification process to have begun, he thinks, but there is no time for that, because Qui-Gon stands beside him in the same spot the wild man had, looking out over the horizon to the stormclouds gathering in the northeast.

"The Guardians of the Whills kept several sacred texts of their own, from the time of their inception," Qui-Gon says without prior introduction. In death, his habit of jumping into the middle of things has hardly changed—if anything, release from a physical body has enabled him to go about it all the more efficiently. "I was granted permission to read some of them—a great honor, and one I undertook with humility, though Obi-Wan did not yet understand why I would not allow him access to the knowledge I had in my hands when I never withheld any other wisdom from him. Those were some trying weeks. But one thing came out of it that I have carried with me, from one life into the next."

Yoda snorts. "If stuck in _your_ head it did, important it must be."

"Quite, Master." Qui-Gon smiles. "It's a section of a passage. It goes like this: _First comes the day, then comes the night. After the darkness shines through the light. The difference, they say, is only made right... by the resolving of gray through refined Jedi sight."_

His voice takes on a lyrical cadence, and Yoda eyes him, considering stumping his cane on the rock. It's quite clear that the cadence is learned and Qui-Gon did far more than merely read the sacred journals kept by the Whills. Instead he sighs and shifts, because his bones are aching, and he considers the passage. The meaning he can understand well enough—but the word choice? A frown overtakes him. "Jedi, hmm. Curious... very curious."

"Consider the gray," Qui-Gon suggests, serene, before something in the Force _shifts_ , and his presence abruptly vanishes from Ahch-To.

Yoda closes his eyes for a moment, questing, but nothing in the currents weaving around and through the island suggest that the shift had been a disturbance. When he has poked and prodded every place he can think of, including the small, strangely neutral nexus below the ancient symbol of the Prime Jedi behind him, and there is no indication of what could've caused Qui-Gon to vanish, he is forced to admit defeat.

The Force works in mysterious ways. He is left with only the beginnings of an answer, and a vision to match Padawan Ruhr's worst is no explanation for the ones she herself sees on a daily basis, but he has not been left with _nothing._

There is more to discover on this island, he is certain. Discoveries that will be of import to the entire Jedi Order, if not the doomed future he has seen in flashes and fractals throughout the long years of his tenure as Grandmaster.

It will only be a matter of finding that which awaits him.

* * *

 **"J'us shiyi zûtazihri tu'iyia qo, Jidai." - "You have lost your way, Jedi." High Sith.**


	15. Chapter 15

Padmé settles back against the wall, crossing her arms. She knows well enough that it's a motion she's adopted from her beloved husband, but for the moment, thoughts of Anakin will have to be put to the side.

"This is our situation, as it stands: we'll get no help from Mas Amedda's faction," she says aloud, and seated on the chaise lounge in the center of the room with the napping twins, Sabé nods. "We didn't expect much from them, though. I've contacted Satine. Bail's sending out feelers to systems in Alderaan's sphere of influence..."

"Senator Mothma?" Sabé asks, tilting her head. She's sitting in the center for more reasons than one; they haven't covered the windows this morning, and while it'd take someone truly audacious to try anything in broad daylight, a healthy dose of paranoia always served Padmé's handmaidens well in the past. Old habits die hard.

Padmé nods. "Chandrila is ready to support the cause. She's got other channels that she plans to pursue, as well. the main issue for her is how close Chandrila is to CIS-occupied space. It's going to be a double-edged sword in the committees."

"Workable, though. I think that most will agree with the sentiment we're presenting." Sabé pauses, her eyes meeting Padmé's; there's a hesitation in them that instantly sparks curiosity in Padmé, who nods—a command as much as anything is. Still, Sabé pauses for a moment before forging on. "Especially given the last main offensive. Rogue One and Variance both released statistics about the battle. The sheer damage—and they didn't even get anywhere near the government apparatus. The vice-generals, sure, but the CIS is hardly toothless, as of now."

Ah.

The hesitation makes sense, now. Padmé weighs her options, then moves to sit next to Sabé, pressing the side of her leg to Sabé's like they used to in the early days of Padmé's reign. "I'm still capable of disagreeing with my husband's actions when he follows orders that are unnecessarily damaging, Sabé."

"No, that wasn't what I meant. I know him being away is difficult—but I meant the starrunners. Nobody knows where they get their data, or why they're releasing it to the galaxy—"

Well. That isn't quite true, Padmé knows. The only true unknown in the equation is Rogue One—befitting of the name, really. Whoever they are, their profile has resisted being sliced into by the best the Jedi and the Republic military has to offer. They're a mystery for the ages. Fulcrum seems largely interested in aiding the Republic, often concerning themselves with the goings-on of the Jedi. Variance is a paid operative, and she'd bet money that Kel Doraniq is of the same breed as Variance.

"—it's just, on top of everything else, the information flow is uncontrolled. The galaxy isn't stupid. They're pooling the information together. And people are starting to think that there's something going on underneath all this." Sabé's chewing on her lip, a familiar wrinkle of distress furrowing her brow.

Padmé considers her handmaiden-turned-aide. "You've been frustrated by this for a long time."

"The entire HoloNet has," Sabé replies immediately, finally looking Padmé in the eyes for longer than a few seconds. "I didn't think I could ignore it, as your aide. A propaganda war could win or lose the one in realspace—but the thing is, only Variance and Kel Doraniq seem to be fighting each other. Rogue One and Fulcrum release complementary information. One will release something, and the other will back it up—"

"Sabé, slow down." Padmé pats her shoulder. A wry smile has found its way to her face almost without her noticing. "If I know you at all, you've been worrying about this for months. Thank you for tracking the areas of the war that I have not been keeping a keen eye on. It was remiss of me—"

"It wasn't," comes the protest, as always.

"—it _was_ remiss of me to neglect the impact of the starrunners, especially with the kinds of information they've put out into the wider galaxy. It would be preferable for them to be known quantities, I agree. But we don't know who they are—only that they consistently put out claims that are backed up by the evidence, even though everyone reads them the way they'd like to."

Sabé sighs, facing her with crossed legs, careful not to jostle a napping Leia behind her. She visibly forces herself to stop chewing her lip, making a face as she does so. "You sound so—alright with that, Senator."

"You were always the one that couldn't resist a good mystery." They share a quick smile. Padmé quickly grows solemn again and lightly rests her hand on Luke's head, lolling on the cushion to her right. "No, I want to know, too. Obi-Wan has theories, but he won't share. It's just that officially, we have to rely on the Jedi and our military—even when the starrunners are right, it's war. The only faction we have cause to trust is ourselves."

Sabé peers at her with the weight of the years between them. "That doesn't sound like you."

"No," Padmé agrees. A silence settles in the room before she speaks again, her eyes at once both thoughtful and distant. "It was the last thing the Chancellor said to me before his death. I disagree, even now. Perhaps that is why I'm choosing to fight for something different."

* * *

 _Jakku?_ she had asked, nearly incredulous. _You're on Jakku?_

Rex tries to be subtle about watching the sky—he really does. But something about hearing her voice again, free and unmodulated, has him as antsy as a greenhorn. Some of his _vod_ keep giving him knowing looks. It figures that they'd notice; you don't live and fight and bleed together in close quarters (sometimes too close) for years on end without learning a thing or two about your comrades and their tells. Especially the 501st. After Krell, they weren't taking any chances.

Luckily for him, the various squads attached to this mission while their Jedi are recovering from injuries don't know him that well yet.

"So, Fulcrum," Sparky—thus named for the incident where he'd accidentally given himself multiple low-level electrical shocks while fixing some burnt-out caseinators in the Coruscant Central Hospital—says casually, pausing in his work on Kix's scanner. "That symbol—"

"Very discreet. Vod's honor," Rex says, just as casually.

Sparky nods. Kix's scanner beeps when he prods one of its exposed wires, a low, mournful electronic noise that very nearly sounds more pathetic than a keening gundark. How the General fashioned it together, he doesn't know. "I'd have chosen something different."

"If hiding was the goal, sure." Rex glances at the sky again.

"Hang in there, Captain."

Rex eyes Sparky. Habitually calm in demeanor, Sparky just leans over the scanner and grabs his duraclips to fiddle with the wires some more.

"I want that scanner in prime condition before the sun rises over the dunes," Rex informs him. It's what he came over here to do, anyhow.

"Yes, sir," Sparky says, unruffled. The scanner beeps again.

After another moment of hedging his bets, Rex finally just shakes his head and steps out of the makeshift repair tent. It's only been an hour since the night patrol turned in for the morning, and somehow, every man already knows the drill. Personally, he suspects Kix, who had badgered him into getting some rest. General Kenobi's poor self-care habits have made Kix far too paranoid.

But "sleep while you can" is one of the hallowed tenets of a war, almost as sacred as the Resolnare, going by Markup's frequent and fervent adherence to it. Rex acquiesced—a captain not in tip-top shape is all too easily an ineffective one—but sleep eluded him. It's one thing to use your downtime well; it's another to be preoccupied by the thought of reuniting with someone you haven't seen in years.

Well. Technically, he's seen her—she's just been wearing a mask with a voice modulator, somewhere halfway across the galaxy, keeping to the outskirts of not only the Core, but the war. Better for her—there's no flimsi or data trail when you live in the shadows, and her efforts have been invaluable for them both, even though they'd hit a durasteel wall all those months back right when they'd found Fives' journal.

But he hasn't seen her in person.

Without her, in his esteemed opinion, something is always missing from the 501st.

As if the thought summoned movement, a tiny light freighter breaks through the pale washout blue of the early morning sky. Rex watches its flight path for a few moments; when it starts getting closer, he nods to Tello and Radian, who have been loitering nearby. They both salute and jog off to the comm station.

"It's been a long time," Rex says to himself. He shakes his head at the way it comes out. "No—never mind. I'll figure it out when I get there."

* * *

Obi-Wan hears the distracted _"a-ha"_ very clearly from Lana's end of the inchoate training bond right before something clicks and a solid, watertight shield forms around her thoughts, reducing the unsettled noises in the back channels of his mind to a barely-noticeable murmur. This has the side effect of nudging him out of his state of meditation. He opens his eyes and blinks against the changed light, brighter now from the window than when he had started in the early hours of the morning.

"That bodes well," he mutters, droll. A self-satisfied Padawan is all too often one that has found mischief.

The bond, at least, has shown itself in his meditation to be one less thing to worry about. The Force's will may be predominant, but explaining its decisions tends to be an exercise in absurdity—something the Jedi, on the whole, tend to be less than comfortable with.

Obi-Wan has endured _quite_ enough grillings by the Council thanks to Qui-Gon and Anakin's "inspired" actions, thank you very much, and he doesn't particularly relish the possibility of spending hours being grumped at by his colleagues over something entirely natural and expected between Jedi who spend enough time together on missions.

He breathes in. _That is what the story will be, at least,_ he decides, very carefully.

Yes. Better for everyone if he continues his social policy of polite ignorance. It had worked while Anakin and Padmé were broadcasting their secret joy to anyone within fifteen feet and when Quinlan hadn't quite mastered sneaking out of the Temple without raising a fuss; it will certainly work for Vokara's strangely insistent offers to update his bloodwork and for Yoda's meddling. Besides, judging by the vague, unintentional currents of thought he's grown used to sidestepping, his intrepid young companion has quite enough to worry herself over already.

If she truly intends to reach Knighthood, that will have to be resolved beforehand. Obi-Wan breaks position and stretches, grimacing at the spurt of pain that shoots up his injured leg.

"Bother," he mutters, because it would be the dismal weather and the faint damp making his bones ache even more than usual. Perfectly expected of the war-scarred veteran he's become.

The course of his thoughts is interrupted by a beep from his comlink.

"Kenobi here," he answers, frowning. All the relevant parties are in the know about the fact that he's taken this mission, so who—?

"Master." Lana's voice. He nearly reaches out to check her signature—with her voice sounding that detached, she could be having another episode—but she's speaking again, and he realizes that there is more urgency in her than detachment. The instinct to help and its implications are, for the moment, ignored. "The Queen requests your presence in the throne room. Looks like your old friend is gracing us with his problems early."

Naturally. It wouldn't be a wartime mission if things decided to go _simply._ Sorely missing Anakin's snarky commentary, Obi-Wan sighs. "I'll be there right away."

* * *

When he arrives in the throne room, the Queen is conversing with her adviser in low tones and Lana is standing to the side with a dark-haired young woman whose uniform marks her as one of the palace guards. Aside from the four of them and the other two guards at the door, the room is unusually empty. Lana strides over to him, her brow knit in concern, and takes up the traditional Padawan position at his side.

"Master Kenobi," the Queen greets, turning with practiced grace to receive him. As with all Naboo monarchs, her poise is unparalleled as she inclines her head in a regal acknowledgment. "Please accept our sincerest apologies for this hurried meeting. It was our hope to allow our guests to rest before attending to matters of state, but it appears that this will not be possible."

The advisor clears his throat. "A man by the name of Maul has stoked the flames of rebellion north of Theed, high in the mountains, and insurgents have begun to make inroads into the city in hopes of gaining munitions and support. Ordinarily, we would have our diplomats reach out to these rebels to see what compromise might be reached..."

"Unfortunately, Maul has demonstrated quite effectively that he is unwilling to negotiate with the Naboo," Lana says, handing Obi-Wan what looks like a hexagonal patch ripped off of a uniform. If it weren't for the bloodstain, the embedded white circle with inward-facing tines would really be quite striking.

Obi-Wan raises an eyebrow. "And this is?"

She makes a face before consciously exerting control to at least _appear_ neutral. "This is the symbol he's taken to using for recruitment. Elisa and I took it off a guard who was acting suspiciously near the reactor room; he had slicing equipment and attacked when questioned. The captain of the guard identified his body as one of several negotiators to have disappeared from Theed over the past year."

"His body?"

Lana raises her chin. For a confused moment Obi-Wan thinks it's defiance, but she tilts her neck and his eyes land on a long, thin wound just barely visible above her collar. The only weapon that'd create a wound like that nowadays is a vibroshiv. "In the fight, I was... momentarily incapacitated. Elisa saved my life."

No wonder she'd been distracted.

The Queen shifts. "The passage northward has been blocked by these dissidents. While we know of the havoc Maul wrought during the Battle of Naboo and the rumors of his doing since, most of our people do not. Those who oppose peace with the Gungans have allied themselves with his faction and taken to watching the swamps.

"We cannot bring the Gungan officials to Theed, as things stand, and neither is it advantageous or advisable for us to leave the city. We would ask that you find a path for the Gungan ambassadors to make their way to Theed. These talks are the symbol of good faith between our peoples, Master Kenobi."

"We shall see what can be done," Obi-Wan says, bowing to the Queen. "Padawan, I trust that you will have our preparations completed as soon as possible."

"Of course, Master." Lana nods to Elisa and bows to the Queen before departing. Obi-Wan shifts, ignoring the look the advisor gives him; he instead fixes his eyes on the Queen, who looks like she has something more to say.

The silence stretches for a bit. "Elisa, Theo," the Queen says at length. "Please depart and attend to your duties."

"As you wish, your Majesty," Elisa says. The two clear out with only a minimum amount of fussing from Theo. When their footsteps fade into the ambient noise of the waterfalls near the throne room, the Queen moves to her throne and settles into it with a weary sigh and a displeased curl to her mouth. Obi-Wan waits, because silence is so often the balm for many hesitations.

"You have my thanks for undertaking this task, Master Kenobi," she says after another extended moment, for the briefest of seconds looking awkward and uncertain before her face smooths out into the traditional stoic mask.

"It is the purpose of the Jedi to keep the peace, as best as possible," Obi-Wan returns.

She meets his gaze finally, and the smallest of smiles turns up the corner of her lips. The children of the Naboo are so often troubled before what other cultures might consider to be their time, Obi-Wan muses. Curious thing. "Is that so? There have been more whispers about the fidelity of the Jedi to their original purpose, as of late. Darth Maul would not have half the support he does if he did not have something to capitalize on. His rebellion is untoward and unlooked-for, but so often it is the foibles of men that turn the wheels of our galaxy."

Her pause is fairly dangerous, also in the fine tradition of Nubian politicans and monarchs. They seem to have a gift for making their silences cutting. "Take care, General Kenobi. Maul is not the only one who is using that symbol, and there are those in the Senate that would sooner see the rise of another faction than see our late Chancellor unveiled."

Obi-Wan only nods, because at this point in his life he very well understands what a warning is and he's far from unaware about the public's opinion of the Jedi. "It is certainly understandable that there are those who would be upset by the length of this war. I assure you that the end of all the undue pain and suffering that has ravaged this galaxy is the only intent of the Jedi—as it ever has been. We would have balance, milady. And balance is only found between the extremes we so often cling to."

"For all our sakes, I certainly hope so."

* * *

Consciousness is a haze of indistinct light and a blur of something moving against it. Well— _moving_ is a bit generous. More like shifting. Like a shadow.

Anakin opens his eyes to blue sky and scruffy dark hair.

"Varykino," he says, almost to himself. "Huh."

"I'm not sure what you expected. You can pretty much blame this place for all the troubles in the galaxy." A young boy with sullen eyes to rival the holos he's seen of Leia's at her most disappointed is seated beside him, taking a break from glaring moodily at the evergreen mountains and the sprawling lake to give him what must be a very piercing look for an eight-year-old.

Anakin snorts and sits up. "Don't cut yourself on that edge, kid."

He might be a little biased, but he hardly sees how a place as beautiful as this could have so dire a crime assigned to it. Varykino is _gorgeous_ —there's so much green it could almost fill the whole galaxy.

The boy scowls. "I know history! This is the place where Vader was made. Just because something looks pretty doesn't mean it is underneath."

"And sometimes some of the ugliest things are the most honest, yeah. You don't survive long if you don't learn that. But pretty things can be pretty inside and out, too. Same holds true for the ugly." Anakin leans back, tilting his face to the sun and relishing in the gentle warmth he feels. No, Varykino is nothing like the desert.

Even if it does have sand.

The boy beside him sulks, angling his torso away from Anakin. He's glaring at the grass like it's personally offended him. _Perhaps it has,_ the unhelpful part of his mind that remembers all Obi-Wan's quips interjects. "You aren't taking me seriously."

"Uh." Anakin stares. Is this his subconscious or... or something? A petulant, oversensitive child with oversized ears?

"I'm a person," the boy says, glaring at him. The sun falls into his eyes—a deep, dark shade of brown, almost black, like Padmé's. "My name is Ben. Will you listen to me now?"

"Weird name. Where are you from—Stewjon?" He's kind of joking, anyways, because something about the way Ben says it brings Obi-Wan's various undercover personas to mind, but the boy frowns. Anakin takes that as a quiet no.

"His namesake was."

At the new, eminently mechanical voice, both Anakin and Ben whirl—Anakin half on his feet with his lightsaber in one hand, Ben turning with a vicious intensity that strikes Anakin as incredibly familiar. A man in dark robes and a ghastly mask stands a few feet away from them, his hands hanging loosely at his sides. He shifts slightly under their combined wary gazes, his hand going to his waist, but whatever he had hoped to find on his belt seems to be gone.

"Get away from me," Ben breathes out in terror, and that's all the warning Anakin gets before Ben is up and hiding behind his legs.

Anakin glances at the small hands fisting themselves in the fabric on either side of his legs. It'll impede his movement—it's a liability, as much as any constraining situation ever is. But annoying or no, he can't stand by and let a child engage with someone so clearly threatening to him. He stares directly at the mask's eyes. Or, at least, where he's pretty sure the eyes are. "Who are you?"

The more he looks, the more this man looks... well, less like a man. He's almost wraithlike, drawing the shadows of the tall grass to him, the ragged cloak hiding what Anakin is sure is otherwise a warrior's muscular frame. Like a warlord from the legends he'd heard from spacers and smugglers and wandering reprobates as a child—the stories of the old wars, full of Force-users and grand battles between light and darkness.

In fact, he looks every inch the part. It's like he's stepped right out of one of the creche's many storybooks, ready to draw the unsuspecting into the Dark through fear and villainy.

 _If that isn't some kind of ancient Mandalorian warlord tunic, I'll eat my belt,_ he vows. He's seen nearly that exact design in one of the storybooks before, he's sure of it. The exact one escapes him, but he'll be damned if that outfit isn't distinctive as all hell.

Long and often madcap years of fighting have taught him something Obi-Wan had never really managed to get at in all those attempts to knock some sense into his stoopa thick skull: hiding behind a mask, literal or otherwise, only means you have something in you that you don't want others to see.

This man, whoever he is, doesn't emit darkness. Not the way the Sith do. It's barely there, even, perfunctory and tentative, and when he notices Anakin poking at his shields, he withdraws into himself and pulls the darkness over his trail.

Anakin's eyes narrow. "Who are you?" he repeats, firmer than the first time he'd said it.

A beat. A harsh, mechanized breath.

Then—

"No one," says the masked man, bleak and unrelenting.

Ben's fists clench further. He mutters something—like maybe _he's right,_ or _I wish_ —but Anakin can't make it out.

He raises an eyebrow. "Take off that mask."

"I'd rather not." The response is dry and immediate. Again he feels a bizarre pang of familiarity, like he should know whoever has the gall to be this smarmy to a Jedi General of the Grand Republic Army, but when he stretches his mind back across the years he can think of no one who could possibly match. Not unless Obi-Wan has a bizarre propensity for black clothing and playing with the Dark he doesn't know about, but last Anakin checked, the darkest shade of clothing Obi-Wan even owns is a dark brown.

"Cute," Anakin says, still loose, still ready for action. "Doesn't change the fact that I'm the one with a lightsaber, between the two of us."

The mask tilts down a bit in what is presumably the direction of Anakin's saber. An intake of breath. "Yes, I suppose you do."

"So. Mask?"

Slowly, reluctantly, the man reaches up and disengages the lock with a _shhk-hiss_ noise. The helmet comes off.

Black hair. Brown eyes. An unfortunate nose. A scar on the right side of his face, stretching from just above his eye down past the edge of his jaw, disappearing beneath the collar of his shirt. Thinned lips and a furrowed brow—he's uncomfortable more than threatened, it looks like, but the frown itself tells Anakin that he's clearly related to the kid. It's like if Ben looked into a mirror.

Anakin looks at Ben behind him, then up at the man, who can't be older than he is and somehow manages to have an inch or two in height over him. "So... are you two related or something?"

"You could say that," is the weary response. The man's eyes sweep over Ben's obscured form, something Anakin can only see as deeply sad prominent in his gaze. "It's been a long time."

"I don't know you," Ben whispers.

The man holds Ben's gaze for a long moment. Then, somberly, without enjoyment—"You will."

"That's great, because I still don't," Anakin cuts in, tired of the melodrama. The Force really is out there today, kind of like all the times he'd space out during his Junior Padawan Philosophy courses and find it showing him distant dreams of what could be. This isn't like his visions of the future, dark and terrible—or even the times he remembers the past and his mother's eyes watching the stars, hoping always but without any real expectation of escape. He raises an eyebrow when the man gives him a miffed look. "Got a name, Mr. No One?"

The sooner he's done with this mess, the sooner he can get back to the action. To the present. To fighting a war that refuses to be won or lost, sent on back-to-back deployments, missing his wife's triumphs and his children learning new fundamentals of life with every day that passes.

Huh. Maybe he'd like to stay a little longer, then.

"I thought I did," the man says. His eyes never leave Ben's. _Son,_ Anakin decides, unbothered by the impossibility of their probable ages. In the Force, the past is the present and the present is the future and the future is the past. The two are too similar to be anything but. _Definitely his son._ "Now I'm not so sure."

"That's helpful," Anakin mutters, grudgingly accepting his impending extended stay in this particular Force vision along with the headache brewing behind his temples.


	16. Interlude

Yan Dooku has never thought of himself as a particularly scrupulous man.

Principled, certainly. But _principled_ does not mean _troubled by moral compunctions._

Ensconced in the library of his modified Punworcca 116-class solar sailer in the depths of hyperspace, speeding away from that miserable dust ball of a planet that Sidious had labeled "Cinder" on his personal map, Dooku takes a careful sip of Alderaanian Oldby wine—a 1417 vintage, by traditional Alderaanian reckoning, and very good indeed—as he contemplates his most recent acquisition.

His Master's passing, as untimely as it was, afforded him with with the opportunity to access certain facilities that he rather suspects he was not meant to be aware of. Moved by the shifting currents of the Force, spreading out across the galaxy and curling around its adherents with the creeping star-specked tendrils of fate and circumstance, no longer stagnant as it had been for years in spite of the chaos Sidious was attempting to sow with the war, Dooku made his choice: power and knowledge were both available to him. There was no reason not to pursue both, but any good warlord was aware that power came first.

Now, with his position in the Separatist movement firmly consolidated, the war at a disgusting standstill, and the Cosmic Force whirling between dancing points of light interspersed by the vast darkness of space, he sits with all the information in the galaxy he could possibly need at his fingertips to solve his burning need to understand the Force and its arcane twists. "Information" including the most likely source of help he has managed to find yet.

He affords the holocron on his desk a glance. The Darkness it emanates feeds him, but taking too much of it is—dangerous. Intoxicating. He drinks for pleasure, not ignominious drunkenness. With a thought he pulls his mind back from its influence. He will not be dominated. He is Count Dooku, but he is also Darth Tyranus.

 _Labels,_ something inside him scoffs, the memory of a headstrong young man lingering unasked-for in the corners of his mind.

 _Labels are useful, Padawan. When you are labeled, you know what people believe you to be. Use that. Act in the way that best suits your ends._

He didn't go to the trouble of investigating that ghastly facility in person and having to deal with that emotional wreck of a boy just to hear his own words be tossed back at him.

"Enough," he murmurs, setting his glass of wine down on the desk and reaching for the holocron. It's cool in his hand, as if it had never been carted through a desert. He closes his eyes and reaches for the Force, this time channeling the Dark willingly, letting it come to him, act as a conduit through him, engage him in a fine dance for control—all things that suit him well, master of Form II that he is, calculated and cool and waiting patiently for the best moment to strike in every circumstance. The rush it gives him brings a small smile to his face. "Speak to me. Tell me your secrets. What Sith magic has merged the Cosmic Force with the Living? What wisdom is there to be found in the long years before the fall of the Sith?"

The holocron hums with energy, rising from his fingertips to float above the desk. It unfolds like a dark blossom, every individual piece shifting and turning with soundless efficiency until a platform in miniature hangs just below his eye level, and in the center a hologram flickers on.

"If you want answers from me," Darth Zannah says, something cruel flickering across the holocron guide's face as she sizes Dooku up, "you'll have to do better than that."

Dooku observes her with a level patience honed by his years with the Jedi. Sidious' notes had mentioned Zannah's curious propensity for mind games—unusual for a holocron, usually limited to being an exclusive library for Force-sensitives with the added bonus of being rather... influential, whatever its alignment. She would have had to be immensely powerful for so much of her to be remembered by the holocron data; while it makes his job more difficult, it does not make it unexpected.

Zannah waits. Whatever she seems to be looking for in him, she doesn't find it. If the legends are true, she respects only strength and aggression. Values she learned at the foot of her infamous master, Darth Bane.

There is more than one way to win a war. She herself ought to be well able to attest to that.

"You are a memory," Dooku says, just as she begins to lose interest. He steeples his fingers.

She raises an eyebrow, as if to say _so? What will you do about it?_

"I can recall you, again and again, without ceasing, until I get what I want." He pauses. "Let us spare each other the expense of playing games. Knowledge is our purview, and my Master knew little. I seek now that which was beyond his reach: the nature of the Cosmic Force."

Amusement flickers across her face. "Oh, you are an interesting one. Your terms are strange to me, but I can guess at what you mean: the Unifying Force, no?"

Dooku raises a severe brow. "That is a perspective, not an aspect. I speak of the most esoteric _aspect_ of the Force, where providence converges with fate—the aspect in which the Force seems to show its will most actively."

"A difficult subject. You are no novice."

"Do tell me. Can Sith magic affect the stream of time? Can it influence fate?"

At the second question, a slow, half-disbelieving, half-impressed smile begins to spread across Zannah's holographic face.


	17. Chapter 16

A dream:

Tatooine is dry and gritty and all sand, as far as the eye can see. Lana shields her eyes with her hand and tries to squint through the desert sun, bright and all-encompassing, into the shadows of Mos Elrey.

Mos Elrey is a settler's town—far in the Western Dune Sea, situated at the edge of the Jundland Wastes, wild and lawless even for the Outer Rim. For Tatooine itself, crime-ridden dust ball on the outskirts of galactic civilization, turning endlessly under its suns and belaboring the lives that seek shelter in it. Mos Espa and Mos Eisley may be scum-ridden dirt holes, but it's a controlled sort of villainy, dictated under the watchful gazes of the Hutts. Not so with Mos Elrey, whose arbiter is the horizon stretching into infinity, stretching into space, stretching into streaks of blue light. Take a hanged man out far enough from the town, leave him between two cliffs half-drowned in sand, and you will never see him again.

Strange thing, Lana thinks, to choose a desert when you've got the galaxy. General Kenobi could've gone anywhere, could've disappeared into Wild Space and never been found again. But maybe that's the point of exile—if you want to be nothing, go to a place where there's nothing. Or something. Who knows with the Jedi generals, shadows of heroes, lost and scattered in the purges. Disappeared into the darkness with the last cinders of their Order crushed into the dust. Maybe they just can't let the last remnants of the past fade away with them.

If there are any left alive. Kenobi is the only one that she's aware of, and only then because of a single conversation she happened to overhear between two military operatives who probably didn't realize that their sound-proofed restaurant booth was no match for a codebreaker's professional curiosity.

Her business is built on cracking the _path_ to secrets of all kinds. Not the secrets _themselves._ Whatever else she happens to find as a result is hardly the part she gets paid for.

Something flickers at the corner of her eye, drawing her attention back to the present. Toydarian wings. She glances through the viewport at the entrance to the landing dock and sees a green-skinned Toydarian decked out in a dark jacket and a striking desert scarf hovering right in the center of the open space between blast doors, eyeing her ship impatiently.

"Not a very subtle broker, are you now," Lana murmurs to herself, casual as you please, and strides out of the cockpit of her modified YZ-775 transport with a fluid grace and an easy hand on her blaster. This job is a special favor to her benefactor; if she can get to Kenobi, and get him to answer the questions her benefactor has, she'll be set for a good amount of time before she has to navigate the treacherous sea of her untrustworthy clientele and their nasty habits of trying to kill her once the job's done again. As always, she casts her awareness out, reaching for that ephemeral, haunting song that sings so much louder in the marrow of the desert, in the desolation blanketing life upon life—

* * *

—and draws in a quiet breath as her eyes open to take in the sleek grey walls and relatively-clean windows of a Nubian civilian transport, unsettled, the sound of Obi-Wan muttering quiet expletives under his breath as he taps away at a deceptively normal-looking datapad filling her ears. Lana shakes her head a little to clear it. Her braid is a reassuring weight hanging from her head, though it's currently hidden from sight by the unassuming cloak Elisa had pushed into her hands as thanks for her assistance in apprehending the man who'd been trying to break into the reactor room in the palace.

 _Grotty piece of bantha poodoo,_ she grumbles to herself, not terribly inclined to be as graceful as a Jedi ought to be when it comes to the thought of the man. The line on her neck is still a tad tender. She had neglected to inform Obi-Wan of how close that particular skirmish had actually come to serious injury; the fault was her own, after all, losing track of her lightsaber and getting swept up in the tides of yet another disorienting vision before she could break out of the grip that desperate man had her in. Something chimes in the Force, distant and far-off, and it's only the fact that they'll be stuck in the transport for another two hours before they hit the dropoff point that makes Lana consider reaching for it.

She pauses, eyes unfocused. Her awareness narrows. The present is forgotten, along with the world.

What had she sensed, again? It was distant. Far off. But shot through with beams of a light no Force-sensitive has felt anything but a pale shadow of in all the long years since this farce of a war began.

 _That's new,_ something in her whispers, almost more a low, insistent murmur. _You couldn't feel that before. It wasn't there before._

Then the opposite side of the transport is impacted by something very heavy. Their carriage rocks precariously. What Lana can only assume to be the maglev thrusters screech in protest as another impact does its level best to knock them over entirely.

"Well, well," Obi-Wan says, bracing his arm against the wall he's very nearly been thrown into. The transport makes a series of alarming _clunks_ as its hovertech fails. The earth of Naboo beneath them thrums with the all-too-familiar unsteady humming of badly-calibrated machinery. He looks out the visible window, peering through the smoke outside, and raises an eyebrow. "Either they're aware of our coming or the bandits of Naboo have somehow found themselves access to Separatist military-grade vehicular disablers. Keep your wits about you, Padawan Ruhr. Combat tests us all differently."

She thinks, quietly, of hot sand and a blaster at her side. Thinks of the way she knows the feel of cool dark metal in her hands, the way her fingers curl around a trigger, even though she's never held any kind of gun—plasma, crystal-powered, or otherwise.

"Understood," she says.

Her hand closes over her lightsaber, the hilt unfamiliar, made for hands that assumed they would always wield the 'saber alongside a beloved Master. She follows Obi-Wan out the door of the transport to where several lifeforms wait, their signatures thrumming with a nervous song, and if she lets herself think she is leaving the past behind, it is only a little lie.

* * *

"Listen," Anakin says. "I'm not here to play games."

"A game?!" Ben splutters.

Anakin slides his foot a little further. Hides the boy just a little bit more. The man in front of them can't seem to stop scanning every inch of Ben, like he'd lost the kid in a sandstorm and the mercy of all the old gods had been the only path to finding him again. "I've got places to be, and I imagine you do too. What do you say you go back to wherever you came from, I take Ben back home, and then I go on my way?"

"If that were possible, I would've done that the moment I found myself here," the man says, the flat tone of his voice at odds with the way he lifts his chin and his eyes flash in annoyance. Like Anakin should've known that already. Everything about it _screams_ royalty—the airs, the arch of the brows, the casual derision.

An aristocrat. Will wonders never cease?

Anakin struggles mightily with the urge to roll his eyes and loses the fight to the sand brat that's always lurked a little too closely to the surface. "What, like you're helpless? You're here because you wanted to be."

 _Like me. You wanted to be like me._

Where did that come from? He blinks, sets the thought aside. There will be time later.

"I didn't want to come _here,"_ the man asserts with a scowl. He eyes the meadow, bright with the Nubian summer sun from Anakin's memories, with something like distaste. "I was—looking for something. This—I didn't mean for this to happen."

And isn't that always how it goes, in the end? You start out on the path you think is right and you walk along it until you look up and realize that somewhere down along the line, you took a completely different turn than you thought you did—a lethal move in a race, in the Boonta Eve classic, traveling through the desert with the stars in your eyes and the wind in your hair and freedom in your spine, only the suns are still shining and the wind comes because you were the one to move and your mother will still go home to a master who, however kind compared to the others, is still a master, and it sets a chain into your soul starting from the vertebrae above your tailbone that extends from the sands to the furthest reaches of the galaxy.

Anakin swallows because the desert is in his throat and on his tongue. This somber-eyed man somehow brings Tatooine rushing back to him, and he's not sure he likes it.

"Figure it out, then," he says, and the words sound a tad too hollow.

Behind him, Ben shifts. "I'll go."

"What?" Anakin glances down. There is something too resigned for a boy's face in the grim way Ben's jaw is set. "You're not the problem here, kid. Stay right there."

"But I am. If I weren't here, he wouldn't be, either," Ben says, eyebrows raised slightly in an imperious look, and he steps back from Anakin's shadow and gestures to the mountains beyond the lake. A summer storm is building around the peaks, stretching out in the sky, and heat lightning crackles in ominous flashes that leave deep purple imprints behind his closed eyelids. "I'll go there. It's far enough away."

 _Far enough away for what?_ he wants to ask, but before he can the man steps back and inclines his head, expression closed but eyes unsettled. "By all means, if you think that will help."

"I'll go with you. You don't know what's in those mountains—" Anakin starts, but Ben shakes his head. Mystified, Anakin stares. "Why not?"

Ben shrugs uncomfortably and wraps his arms around himself. "It's something I have to do. I can't explain it. How do you answer the pull in your head?"

"Well, you don't run off without a plan, for starters." Anakin cocks a brow and very carefully does not mention the hypocrisy threaded through his words, grateful for Obi-Wan's absence in this instance. Any credulity he might possibly have with Ben would be blown right out of the water by the ungainly _harrumph_ that he can hear in his head, even now.

But Ben gives him an ancient-eyed look, weary and knowing, like a Jedi child displaced in time. It reminds him of Obi-Wan. Uncomfortably so. "I'm going. Maybe I'll see you around."

He doesn't seem convinced of his own words. It's very nearly painful.

"I'm coming with. It's ridiculous to expect you to go alone." He puts aside his unease and catches up to Ben in a few short strides—

 _Master,_ a familiar voice says. A voice he hasn't heard in _years._

Anakin stops in his tracks, swallowing hard through the sudden lump in his throat. _Ahsoka._

"You see?" Ben says, not turning around. The growing wind begins to whip at his hair, flicking his long bangs into his face, but he doesn't reach up to move them from his eyes. His thin shoulders are tense, slightly hunched, and his arms swing with a careful precision—one leg out, one arm out, move, repeat, march. "There'll always be something more important. That's how it is when you're fighting for something."

"And that's the way it has to be. No matter if you're being torn apart," the young man says from behind them. He walks forward, past Anakin, and stops between them, hands loose at his side and a new calm in his eyes. His cowl flutters about him, the ragged, frayed edges like tendrils of darkness, his eyes darker wells, full of foreboding. Anakin knows, like he knows that he hadn't meant to come here to Varykino and the storm hiding the sun from them bodes worse than he can fully understand, that the young man has done this all before and he will do it all again.

 _Master, hold on. I'm coming for you._

He swallows because he is uneasy, because he doesn't have the proper education, because his upbringing wasn't _civilized_ and what does he know of the Force, really, surrounding them and engulfing their beings? If he was just a little smarter, just a little bit of a better student— "What are you talking about?"

"You don't remember, do you." Ben doesn't pose it like a question, though he phrases it like one. Finally he turns his head to look at Anakin and for a dizzying moment the world tilts sideways when there's yellow in his irises, and he's a child, a _child,_ how could he possibly be Dark? A blink and Ben's eyes are the same shade as Padme's, lit by Varykino's afternoon as the storm rolls down the mountains, and Anakin stares, unnerved. He couldn't have just seen that. He _couldn't._ Ben is dour and morose and even now he looks terribly sad, but nothing in his presence or his demeanour suggests the sadistic glee those eyes signify. "I guess you wouldn't. The legends say Vader had a special interest in this place. But the legends also say the Empire was in control by the time he acquired it from the Nubian royal government. Mom says we haven't found the exact records yet, anyways."

"Ben." Anakin takes a step forward, intending to kneel down to better meet the boy's gaze, but the young man's boots in the corner of his eye make him think better of the motion. "Who is Vader? What Empire? The Republic has been in control of the galaxy for a thousand generations—"

"Not in his time," the young man says.

Ben gives him a gimlet eye. "Mom says that if you don't have anything nice to say, you shouldn't say anything at all."

"Your mother taught you to use your words nicely in order to make them into weapons. Or she tried to, at any rate," the young man counters, dispassionate, and turns to Anakin. "Let old things die, Skywalker, or watch them be ripped from you. The Republic was—is—corrupt. You know it. It always was. The Republic took you from your mother. Left her to die—"

Not _this_ again.

"Enough," Anakin cuts in, his jaw clenching. The anger in his chest unfurls again, reaches out, and in this hazy dream of Varykino the storm breaks over their heads and begins to rage. Harsh droplets of rain rapidly fill the space between them. In the time it took the man to say all that, Ben has made his way away from them. His small form disappears, concealed by the rain and the biting winds. Anakin locks eyes with the man across the scant few feet of meadow separating them and takes a breath. His mother—no. That is off-limits. He will not touch that here. "The Republic is broken, but it isn't unsalvageable. I learned that here. I've fought for years for the Republic—I wouldn't do that if I didn't believe in it, in the cause."

He nearly jumps out of his skin when Ahsoka steps into the corners of his vision, standing firm at his side as the young man sucks in a breath. "I wouldn't be so sure about the cause, if I were you."

"Guess it's a good thing that you aren't him," Ahsoka says. She wears a familiar smile, like she had in the old days when she was just a bratty kid and he was a glorified babysitter, and yet—and yet. In the moment, Anakin sees her as he thinks she was always meant to be: fully-grown, a tall, proud warrior in her own right.

 _Oh,_ he thinks, forgetting all circumstance and hardship and the long distance created by the years of radio silence. _Snips, you're incredible._

She spares him a glance. There's an unfamiliar wariness and weariness in them that brings him plummeting back to earth, a diminished warmth, but the spark in her still burns, indomitable and inimitable. "Besides," she says to the young man, turning to him fully. "You don't belong here, do you? I thought you were just one of his visions... but now I see you. You're something else, I think. Something different. Whatever you're looking for isn't here."

Their eyes lock for an uncomfortably long time, sizing each other up. At last the young man bows his head. It's more of a shallow, mocking dip than anything. "Perhaps you're right. I'll go."

With that he steps back and something reverberates in the Force—a tangible noise, like a pebble dropping into water. His form ripples. Then, quite suddenly, his presence is simply gone. Anakin and Ahsoka are left side by side in the pouring rain, his hair plastered to his skin, her montrals inadvertently guiding the onslaught of water down her temples and forcing her to blink. She squints up at the rain, shielding her eyes with one hand, and turns to him with her mouth open.

"I don't know how to stop it," Anakin says, holding his hands in the air. Something in him still feels off-kilter, like he's done a couple corkscrews in a row to evade an enemy fighter and only narrowly come out the other side.

Ahsoka shakes her head. "That's... not fine, but it'll have to wait. Follow me, okay? We need you back out there, and getting in here wasn't exactly a piece of cake."

* * *

A humanoid woman wearing a deep hood steps off one of the speeders that has surrounded the transport. Each one has a sentient on it, all of varying sizes and species, all unnervingly silent. Who knows how many eyes are on them? Lana shifts.

Fear drifts on the currents of the Force—but not fear of the Jedi. No. If anything, it's fear directed at... themselves?

"Master," Lana murmurs. Putting aside her personal reservations for the moment, she reaches for his mental presence and finds it cool and solid. _Do you sense this—_

 _Naturally._

The woman holds up her hand. On her wrist is a bulky bracelet, ugly and crude, undoubtedly cobbled together by a second-hand slicer. Lana recognizes the signs: singe marks and sharp edges, the unstable-looking inset of the small data screen on the broad side, the one with the number counting down. One of the visible wires connected to the display is coursing with energy. It leads to a small package on the back of the woman's hand.

 _Separatist explosives._ Obi-Wan's legendary calm renders the comment deceptively mild, as if he were commenting on the weather and not weaponry entirely capable of blowing everyone present to bits should they make one wrong move.

"Surrender." The woman's voice is thin and brittle.

There's a weighted pause, a breathlessness in the air, and then Obi-Wan slowly raises his hands. His palms are open and empty. He's not making any motion to push the riders away.

 _Master?_

 _Follow my lead, Padawan._ Flashes of missions gone wrong: holding cells that are never quite secured tight enough for a Jedi, enemy military installations that are all too easy to extract information from, innocents caught in a war they never asked for and that no one wanted. Beyond that—dark humor borne of dark memories. _Think of this as... expediting the process. Working our way out from within. And, perhaps, preventing a needless loss of life._

Lana raises her hands as well, unhappily allowing the woman to divest her of her lightsaber. One of the shorter sentients hops off their speeder and takes out what look to be two pairs of distressingly high-tech manacles from somewhere beneath their cloak; another, long and lanky, fishes two Nubian reed-fiber sacks from a satchel attached to their seat. Something in the shift of the rough fabric and the way the sunlight breaks through the passing cloud overhead triggers the memory of the desert town deep within her, but the fragments are all jumbled now— _not a very subtle broker_ —who had she been speaking to?—and somewhere between her attention being stolen away and now, she'd lost the vibrancy of it. She'd lost the part where it had fit into the other ones, the common feeling of _otherness,_ of something discordant in the fabric of the Force—

 _Keep your mind in the present._

She blinks.

 _My apologies for invading your space. I shall endeavor not to do so more than is necessary._ Obi-Wan takes a sack being shoved over his head with remarkable dignity; moments before the other sack obscures her vision, she catches sight of one of the sentients—a Weequay, maybe, by the shape and the shadow of the snout poking out from beneath the hood—raising his sleeve in a perfunctory motion and sniffing it. _We shall need this bond before the end, I think. The Force works in mysterious ways._

A sharp impact between her shoulder blades pushes her forward. Lana lets out a breath and allows herself to be led to one of the speeders. Which one it is, exactly, is very nearly impossible to decipher, but it doesn't really matter.

They aren't searching her or Obi-Wan, though their obvious weapons have been confiscated. Her tiny rigged datapad, ensconced behind her wide belt, fits snugly next to her skin.

That's all she needs, in the end.

Lana allows herself to smile. With the sack over her head, none of their erstwhile captors will see it; neither will Obi-Wan, who lingers respectfully at the edge of her mind, occupied by tracking their path as best he can. Her datapad is safe. So are its contents. That alone is worth the constant unrest the visions have brought her—worth the sleepless nights on their transport to Naboo and the unsettling encounters with the man wreathed in darkness in the dreams she has after every visit to the Healer's Ward.

In the most secret places of her mind, carefully cultivated and curated by a girl who had no other recourse in the sensitive environment of the Jedi Temple, she thinks: _Just these last bits of evidence, and I have my proof that the Chancellor was not what he claimed to be._


	18. Chapter 17

The long shadows and shifting light of the world blurring around them serve as a simulacrum of hyperspace while their kidnappers are transporting them to what is presumably either a holding facility or Maul's base itself. Bored enough to fall into a light doze, slumped uncomfortably against the small back of the cloaked figure piloting the speeder she's bound to, Lana drifts into the sea that is and is not. As always, the Force tugs.

 _What do you want from me?_ she asks it. Not as petulant as she might have been, once, in the bad old days past her Master's death, but with a dreamy ease. She has fallen into it so many times before it is almost like slipping into a second skin. _What haven't I heard?_

Abruptly, far more abruptly than she's used to, the Force pulls her away from the present and into its waters. Lana stifles a cry of alarm as she plunges downward past the bottom edge most Jedi descend to in meditation, scrabbling for the edges of her own consciousness to try to maintain at least a passing awareness of herself.

 _I am Lana Viszka Ruhr!_ she yells in a panic, quite regretting her lowered guard, uncaring of who—or what—might hear it through the fabric that makes the worlds. The visions pull her in regardless.

They're quicker this time, tumbling past her in fractured, incomplete stills rather than a sustained, moving environment. She watches a luminescent ocean wash up against black sand, then she sees a clearing with a structure made of dark stone in the depths of that one jungle with the massive trees. Cold, high laughter rings as colors flash—red against yellow against black—then noise again: blaster fire and multiple explosions in a battle in some distant war beyond her reach. Qui-Gon's voice comes at one point, faint in all the din, crying out a warning she can't quite decipher, until the familiar voices of her fellow Jedi cry out in the desert wastes and find themselves extinguished. Then silence.

 _Remember, child,_ Qui-Gon's ghost is saying in her living room in the Temple as the sun sets and forgotten things creep into the underbelly of vast Coruscant. _Yoda does not teach without knowledge. Remember. He has a favorite saying, do you remember?_

 _Even in the midst of darkness, luminous beings are we._

Something in Lana quakes when he says it to the girl with short blonde hair and a mulish expression sitting across from him, though Yoda's often-fond reminder for all the Jedi is exchanged around Temple so much that it tends to lose all true meaning. As quickly as her mind had been thrown into a disjointed jumble of images, Qui-Gon and the Temple and the girl all vanish; there is darkness and only darkness, and then she lets out an _'oof'_ as she hits the ground and feels sand and grit scatter on impact.

"Stars," she groans as she curls onto her side. The sound of crashing waves meets her ears.

 _Oh,_ she thinks, opening her eyes. _Oh no._

The water ripples. Fast approaching over the horizon is that great, terrible light, awful and expanding, reaching into her soul and striking at the core of it.

She sucks in a breath.

The light remains.

"What is this?" Lana whispers, scrambling up to her feet on the black sand beach, backing away from the waves, away from the horizon. _"Vhykr vodhr!_ What is this, what is—"

"—You know what this is."

A voice behind her. Not Qui-Gon. Not Yoda. Not even the young man wreathed in darkness.

"You know what it is. You're just too afraid to face it."

It's the young woman with brown eyes who has only come to her in the rarest moments, each time hard and unrelenting as she was in life.

Lana turns to her and swallows. "You."

"Me," the daughter of Galen Erso says with a voice like flint. "You remember, don't you? You never forgot. Just ignored it all. Decided to go about things your own way."

Lana opens her mouth to protest, but Jyn Erso shakes her head and steps forward, facing the light.

"I'm not used to people sticking around when things go bad. That's what I said to the Captain—to Cassian. That's why I never looked up. Never wanted to see the Empire unfurled in all its glory. It wasn't a problem for me. It was a problem for other people to handle. I didn't want to join. I just wanted to survive."

"I hardly spoke to you," Lana reminds her, not sure how someone who isn't Force-sensitive has found her way to this place, but people as stubborn as Jyn Erso tend to have a problem with authority, up to and including the laws of nature.

Jyn hardly spares her a glance. "You were very loud."

"I never said a word!"

"People like you can't just hide. No matter how featureless your helmet is. Besides, you reported to Cassian." She twists the kyber crystal on her necklace and holds it with one hand, her eyes never leaving the great wall of light and the ocean storm it's kicking up. "You're on the run, aren't you? And you have been. For a long time."

Lana draws in a breath and tries to remind herself that she _asked_ the Force. She really, really did. "I've lived in the Temple since I was a child. How could I be running anywhere?"

"You know what I mean. Running is a state of mind and all that. You carry it with you, so cut the bantha chiszzk. Why are you running, Lana Viszka Ruhr?" Jyn asks.

Her heart leaps into her throat. _Because it is what I have always, always done. Because running is the quickest way to get to where you're going. Because the galaxy needs it._ "We've all got our reasons."

At that, Jyn scoffs. "Sure, okay. I guess I should've expected that from a spy. Ask a stupid question..."

"I'm not a spy."

"But you were, once."

Lana looks back to the jungle encroaching on the far side of the shore and wonders if it's too late to trek in that direction, or if she would just find herself here again on this beach, facing the light she's never really let herself look at. "From a certain point of view."

"You get into abstractions like that and you can justify pretty much anything," Jyn says sharply, taking a pointed step away from her. "I don't know how I'm here. All those rules—out there—before the light—none of them apply here. It's a strange place, and I don't fully understand it. But something important does apply to you. You're alive. You're not supposed to be able to reach this place. And you won't be able to again."

Shocked and maybe a little offended, Lana raises an eyebrow. Her connection to the Force is _different,_ she knows, and something has always rung somewhat off—kilter in her communion with it, but— "What do you mean?"

"Don't know. That's your problem, twinkle-toes. You get here somehow and leave... ripples. Echoes. Loud ones. Whatever it is you did to yourself, it reverberates." For the first time since she's arrived, Jyn shifts in discomfort. She looks at Lana with an uncharacteristic hesitation in her eyes.

"I didn't take you as one to beat around the point, Jyn Erso." Even though there's an awful feeling in the pit of her stomach that she already knows what's about to come.

She snorts at that, a brassy sort of brashness that Lana thinks she could have grown to like once, and the hesitation is gone as if it had never existed. "Look, I didn't come here to have some kind of witty repartee with you. I came because you were there. At the end."

The light reaches the far mountains over the water and to the east. Stone and sand and water all crumble together in a vortex unconstrained by time and space, spinning in an invisible wind, kicking up the largest wave she's ever seen.

"Whatever you're running from," Jyn says as the tidal wave nears them, her eyes burning into Lana, "it'll catch up with you. Always does."

* * *

Obi-Wan closes his eyes and lets the Force, rather than his erstwhile, shaking captor, guide him through the subterranean halls of whatever little base Maul has built for himself this time. He must be careful, of course. Maul will be watching—in fact, it's entirely likely that he already knows that his people managed to capture him and Lana—and it wouldn't do to alert his foe to the fact that he's already worked out how to break the cufflinks they've put him into. After Ventress's methods of subduing her Force-sensitive bounties, the simple maglink-sealed cuffs are child's play.

Feeling along the edges of the base isn't too difficult, anyways. There are various lifeforms scattered within, not unlike many of the enemy bases he's had the luxury of sensing out before the inevitable break-in, and the walls somewhere further below the corridor they're being marched through are made of a living material that may or may not be imbued with something else that stretches just beyond his perception. More than anything, that draws his attention. He's not the one that's versed in what Quinlan has more than once referred to as "the botanical arts", but after the first ysalimir incident, he had been at some pains to be able to identify the nature of similar dampeners in the Force. Much to his dismay, there are more than a few vine-like growths that suppress the Force and love dark, damp places.

Knowing his luck, there's bound to be _some_ kind of dampener making up the prison cells.

 _Lana_ , he calls into the training bond. She murmurs something indistinct in response, faint and far off, and again that disquieting ripple in the Force reaches him. _Lana, focus your attention on the here and now._

He gets very little in response. Again the Force pulses around her, a little stronger this time, and Obi-Wan begins to suspect that something is very wrong. A cursory probe in her direction yields a strange block behind unusually weak shields, focused inward rather than outward.

 _What in the blazes?_ His vision is currently obscured by the ungainly sack over his head, which had hardly been a problem before. Now he dearly wishes he could take a look at her. The onset of her visions are generally swift and unpredictable—and "unpredictable" was something he had hoped would play into her favor on this mission, if so that she might see that her self-imposed in-Temple exile needn't be a lifelong predicament.

He can work around any state his mission partners happen to find themselves in (he's certainly dragged Anakin to the end of all sorts of missions in varying stages of pain, unconsciousness, and near-death) but for what Yoda had asked of him, maneuvering Lana into a position to begin moving forward again would be the most beneficial thing.

All that is rendered moot by the presence of that internal block, which has been documented precisely nowhere in Lana's medical files. Neither Vokara nor the previous Healer overseeing her case, Ord Luun, leave any record of it.

 _Patience. You can check once you're situated,_ he reminds himself.

"Get up and keep walking," one of their captors grunts further ahead, then there's a hurried shuffle of footsteps and a curse in what sounds like a dialect of Rodian. "Targa, carry her."

There is a pause as a mechanical breath is sucked in through the leader's mask and exhaled. "Why? What's wrong?"

"Do it! I don't know. She just fell over. It might be a ploy to escape."

More steps, these booted, sound on the sparisteel flooring. Another long pause, then the sound of cloth shifting and a sharp mechanical inhale. "By the old gods," comes the voice that would undoubtedly be shaky if it were not modulated to neutral. "Her eyes..."

"Can humans... do that?" asks a new voice near him, uncertain and unhappy.

"She's likely just fainted," Obi-Wan cuts in, smiling to himself when there's a collective, audible pause. "Rough travel like this is dreadfully hard on some of us. We weren't built terribly sturdy, you see. If you're not careful with her, you might break something."

"What do you know?" snarls the mechanical voice, but there's more shifting and shuffling around him as their escorts hang about, uncertain and uncomfortable. "Whatever. I'll carry her. Keep an eye on him—I don't trust chatty prisoners."

 _Well, then._ _You're in good company, my friend. I can't say I trust chatty jailors._ Obi-Wan resists the urge to whistle. Anakin might have, but he certainly won't. It'd be far too undignified under these circumstances, and he doesn't fancy catching a rage-induced beating _quite_ yet.

* * *

Lana wakes to a pounding headache and something like regret lingering in the corners of her mind, though about what she's hardly sure. Cold, hard steel is under her back, and her head is crooked to the left in a way she knows she's going to hate when she decides to move. It takes but a few moments for her to regain her bearings; she opens her eyes and sees Obi-Wan across the small room, seated cross-legged on the opposite bench in meditation.

There's an energy field blocking their access to the hall on her left and a small 'fresher to her right that looks like it's seen better days, all its questionable cleanliness and missing facets considered, and aside from that, there is absolutely nothing else of note except a tiny vent hole in the ceiling.

"This happen often?" she asks from her place half-curled up on the cold bench, for a lack of anything better to do.

Obi-Wan's eyes flick open. "You have no idea," he says dryly.

Outside, footsteps sound from further away. Obi-Wan taps his head. _Keep your mind open to mine—_

 _—I am, though, Master._

 _Nonetheless,_ he says. _Be certain that you do. There is a certain type of shielding I think could be beneficial to you in this predicament, and I won't risk enemies of the Order overhearing it._

Meaning Maul. She makes a face. _Yes, Master._

"I saw that. Respect your elders, Padawan." The guard, decked out in a dark uniform accented with crimson, peers through the energy field. Lana makes a gesture that she's certain is universally offensive; Obi-Wan rewards her with a firm mental _thwap_ as the guard steps back, visibly stung, and hurries away.

"How long was I out?" _Sorry, Master._

 _Oh, I've never heard_ that _before._ "I'm afraid it's difficult to say. The both of us were somewhat in a bind, if you recall."

"I remember that much. So... what now?" _I am truly sorry, Master, and I humbly repent._

 _If you say so, Padawan. Listen to my breathing and attune yourself to the pattern._ "Oh, there's not much to do when one's in this sort of situation. These cuffs are rather ingenious. I'm sure our captors will come to us soon enough. In the mean time... meditate."

"Yes, Master." Lana draws herself up into a seated position and hurries to copy his slow, even breaths. The particular sequence he's using is an unusual one as far as Jedi praxis goes. She frowns, combing her mind for any visual reference, and comes up only with one of the paper books in the Archives—exceptionally rare, exceptionally precious, exceptionally untouchable by Padawans. It had described a form of battle meditation that required extended, unmoving focus for a period of several minutes, which always seemed rather useless to her.

But it's _Obi-Wan Kenobi,_ the famed Negotiator, the warrior who has won a thousand battles. Hopeful that the visions won't drag her away thanks to that lovely little storm that came upon her earlier, she takes a deep breath, exhales, and follows him into both the breathing sequence and the training bond. Though he sees her presence, he says nothing; Lana tries not to be impatient, sensing another one of those lovely _teaching moments_ coming on.

 _Kiros,_ he begins. _Derived from the ancient script—an evolution of "kira", which translates directly to "light". The Order devised this method of shielding in the days when energy fields had just begun to be utilized across the galaxy to inhibit access to sensitive areas thanks to an innovation in the field, which had previously seen very little advancement thanks to the prevalence and functionality of cross—beam lasers. The galaxy, of course, was at war._

Lana senses more than she sees the memories that pass over his presence. Christophsis, she thinks. Savareen. Possibly Jabiim—but he pulls away from that, gently, and locks it away in a place outside of her reach. She doesn't pry.

 _Often, Jedi were finding themselves in situations where they were trapped between energy fields while their opponents laid in wait._ A definite visual flash, then, of Maul through a film of pink plasma, something he presents her to make a point before tucking it back where it came from. _Their minds were disordered from battle, and their bodies taut with adrenaline. The younger ones found the task of staying connected to the Force a very difficult thing when caught between acid vats and their opponents, and many, despite their training, could not hold onto their partnership with their lightsabers and focus on battle at the same time._

 _So, these shields—help with that?_ Discipline is a better balm for a lack of self-control than shielding, they all know. Lana frowns.

Obi-Wan hums a little. _From a certain point of view. That is what the Kiros shield was developed to do. But one could say that the shields have outgrown their original purpose._

 _Do tell._

 _It was discovered, over time, that a Kiros shield focused upon and held for long enough would linger in the wielder's mind—a block against outside influences, an internal exhortation to be calm and listen to the Force. Its detractors called it a self-mind trick, but it began to save the lives of many Padawans, and most dissent was ignored until after the Mandalorian Crisis. The dust had settled, and the issue of its dominance came up. After debate, and a council ruling, the Kiros shield was declared a Grey skill._

Lana quirks a brow. A skill considered to be caught somewhere between light and dark is terribly unusual. Historically, she knows, the Council ruled on such matters in starker terms. That Obi-Wan knows all this and more about the minutiae of ancient Council rulings is a testament to either long nights spent sleepless during his former Padawan's training or the knowledge gleaned from careful study during his own days as a student; she's not sure which is more likely.

 _The Archives don't take it very lightly for that reason, Lana. There's still some debate over its effects on personhood and free will. However, it gives its users an undeniable edge in battle—it calms them and focuses them on the present, rather than any other state of being._

All in a flash, she understands what he's saying. _So, my visions...?_

 _Hypothetically, they are held at bay until you drop the shielding. It functions half as a suggestion and half as a locus for the Force. Hold the shield and the Force flows through you. The downside is that in battle, it isn't terribly useful unless you plan ahead._ His eyes open for a moment to pin her with a serious look. _Always plan ahead, Lana._

 _Oh, I've got that covered._

Obi-Wan smiles at that, the creases at the corners of his eyes crinkling with the motion. _You're quite resourceful, true. Now—I'll demonstrate, step by step._

* * *

"So," Anakin says, sitting down heavily on the crate that functions as his command chair. "What happened?"

Rex stands next to Ahsoka, who has two new pieces of gear: a strange helmet that looks almost like an elongated form of the classical Mandalorian crusader helm most of the shinies come with when they're fresh from the training facilities and a cloak that must be woven with nanotech fibers—it conceals her montrals in a way no normal cloak possibly could, no matter how baggy it might be. The two of them shift uncomfortably under his gaze.

"Well?" Anakin asks. He catches himself drumming his fingers on the small canvas table, and forcibly stops himself from bouncing his knee. _Such nervous behaviors are unbecoming of a Jedi,_ multiple instructors had told him. The thought induces a confusing tangle of emotions in him—shame, fear, resentment, _anger?_ _That's new_ —and he shoves it all away, for the moment intent on filling in what appears to be a sizable block of missing time.

"You were knocked out, sir. Dooku did some Force trick—waved his hand and threw us all against the wall. Jock and I got concussions, but you weren't waking up. As Captain, I decided to call in for some help." Rex looks almost guilty, for some reason, though he can't imagine why.

Ahsoka steps forward. "Anakin," she says with no hint of levity, her voice modulated by the filter on her helmet, and something in that feels like a loss. "I came here for a reason. Well, multiple reasons, but the point remains. We—I—need your help. This war has to end."

"What do you think I've been trying to _do?_ " he asks, aghast. If there's a more obvious statement in the galaxy beyond _we can't take more of this war,_ he has yet to hear it.

"I get that, but things have changed. Did Obi— did General Kenobi receive my message?"

Anakin frowns as he combs his memory for any kind of message Obi—Wan was supposed to receive. "I don't— I—"

"If it was about Fives, he might have. You asked me about him before Jakku, General Skywalker." Rex presumably exchanges glances with Ahsoka, though her helmet makes it hard to tell. "Do you remember that?"

He does, vaguely, and the fact that he can barely recall it sets him on edge. He grits his teeth. "Yes."

"Maybe we ought to have Kix examine you first," Rex starts, but Anakin's already shaking his head.

"Absolutely not. Ahsoka, explain yourself. You and I both know this war needed to end years ago."

Ahsoka's shoulders stiffen. "Oh, _absolutely,_ Anakin," she bites back. "Let's not forget that I'm not your Padawan any more—I'm grown now. The war needs to end because it's draining the entire galaxy of resources and keeping countless sentient beings in a state of perpetual suffering and terror. Can't you feel the malaise that's laid itself over the Force? The Chancellor is gone, but it hasn't lifted—"

"—Why would Palpatine's death do anything but make it worse?" Anakin asks sharply, his own temper rising. He's largely ignored the fact that his closest friend and dearest mentor had not only passed, but been _murdered,_ because he's been neck-deep in logistics and munitions acquisitions and battle plans and his men need him to keep a strong face as he leads them into battle. Prior to Palpatine's death, they'd hardly spoken face to face in months—the work was always busy, the battles always vital. It should sting a little less, he knows. But this... "The Chancellor was a good man."

The long hiss from her modulator, he chooses to believe, is less frustration and more a sigh. "You're the only one who still believes that."

"He had a whole slew of reforms he was planning to put into place after the war," he reminds her, again drumming his knuckles on the canvas table, a testy note that surprises a small part of him that has been doubtful for a long while. "The Senate blocked him at every turn. And he didn't ask for power—"

"—The point is that for the balance to be brought back, the war _has_ to end. Swiftly." Ahsoka paces across from him, her cloak swishing and kicking up sand and dust. "Never mind the Chancellor, or what he might have done. The dead are the dead. _We_ are the ones who live on. You. Me. Rex. The 501st. We can end this war, and we can do it by striking at the heart of the Confederacy's droid production operations—the Techno Union factories _and_ their headquarters on Skako Minor."

Anakin balks at that. "They produce munitions for _us,_ not the Seppies!"

"They're arms dealers with no stake in who wins, so long as the credits keep pouring in," she retorts, pulling a data chip out of a pouch tied to her belt. "I can prove it, just like I proved that the Kaminoans installed control chips in our men without anyone's knowledge or consent. You're an engineer, Anakin. You work on proofs and technical details. Have a droid read this disk out and you'll find the templates for seven different kinds of Confederate battle droids, all stamped with the Techno Union's—and specifically the Baktoid Armory's—data signature. They don't care who their arms go to so long as they have their funds."

"I... Ahsoka, I have no reason not to trust you," he admits, swallowing hard. His temper only ever brings him regret in the end; he's managed to hurt Ahsoka with it again, judging by her sharpness. He takes the data chip anyways. "I believe you. I don't know how you found this information, but I believe you. It's just—this is a massive undertaking, even for me."

Rex clears his throat. "With all due respect, sir, that's where we come in. Me especially. My _vod_ and I, all we've known and been trained to do has been to fight. A few of us want more than that after the war, but we're willing to put the work in to make that happen _sooner_ rather than _later._ "

"What about those of you who are still under the chip's control?" Anakin leans his elbow on the table and kneads his forehead. There's already a dull headache building up behind his temples, the likes of which Obi-Wan had always promised him he'd find when he began training an apprentice of his own but which eluded him until now. He's an engineer at heart, true, and it's that very fact that he somewhat regrets as the sheer scale of what Ahsoka and Rex (because it's both of them, he knows) want to accomplish begins to dawn on him.

Karkin' _stars,_ Padme is not going to be happy with him.

He scowls and thinks of all the dirtiest Huttese curses he knows. None of them seem to be appropriate for the magnitude of what will undoubtedly befall him once his wife hears about this. He can already hear her _first_ lecture about putting Ahsoka in the line of fire unnecessarily— _we're on the front lines of a_ war, _Padme—yes, and she should live long enough to see you survive it!—_ and the second?

She doesn't know, he realizes, somewhat belatedly. Padme is only human. She has no possible way of knowing about Ahsoka's grand re—entry into his— _their,_ it'll be their—lives.

"I'll go to Kamino," Ahsoka is saying, her arms crossed and her feet planted firmly on the ground, albeit half—submerged in sand. "There's possibly a way to re-wire the chips, send out a broadcast—I have evidence that suggests that they can be turned off—"

"Just suggests?" Anakin asks. "Not confirms?"

Ahsoka pauses. "Just suggests," she confirms.

"What happens if you fail, Ahsoka?"

Neither Ahsoka nor Rex answer, though Rex's expression turns grim at the question.

Anakin glances between them. He chews on his lip and feels the copper tang of dried blood and a small rend that brings up the skin of his lip the more he worries at it. When was the last time he moisturized? He loved that about Coruscant—hygiene supplies were always available. "You want me to set up an assault on the Techno Union—our allies, on paper—on the _hope_ that you'll be able to turn off the chips taking up space in our men's skulls, preventing them from falling victim to the inevitable backlash. Why should I do it? Why should I focus on the official Union factories instead of the satellites? Instead of Dooku?"

"Dismember the Union," Ahsoka says, pulling her cloak hood down and her helmet off to stare Anakin in the eye, "and you create a power vacuum that the Hutts can't ignore, forcing them back out of isolation and back into negotiations with the Republic. Make it a coordinated assault and you destroy the droids, too, leaving the Confederacy without an army, the Republic without a retaliatory force, and our men with their freedom. All that's left is the officer core on both ends—and you can't fight a war with that alone. Dooku won't have a leg to stand on. Bring a neutral third party in to negotiate a treaty..."

"...and you have peace." Anakin meets his former Padawan's gaze and finds the weight of years in them. "This plan is bloody, Ahsoka. Inflammatory. You could almost call it _rebellious."_

She smiles for the first time since she woke him from the dream. "I was never a very good Jedi. Besides... rebellions are built on hope."


	19. Chapter 18

By the time the guards come to retrieve them from their cell toward whatever end they have in mind, Lana has begun to grasp the shape and the feel of the Kiros shield—a near-tangible thing in her mind, so unlike what most of Jedi praxis tends to teach.

 _Reach out with your feelings,_ Ki-Adi Mundi would say in the Adept Padawan classes when he was still teaching them. _See the unseen and know the unknown. This is the Force, and the shield forms around the heart, protecting and balancing the Jedi within. Always defense, Padawans. It is always meant for defense._

 _Yes, Master,_ they would say in unison, whether or not they understood. Ki-Adi would accept questions, but he had a habit of turning them back on the questioner and going past the set time for classes until the inquiry was answered. Nobody wanted to be stuck near the botanical gardens and the hideous stench of the zul'thria flowers past fourthmeal again.

Lana can only assume that the nebulous shield he had spoken of to his classes was a form that was beyond her at that time. Like many adolescents, she had been surly and uninterested in what those beyond her purview had to say. Much of what the Masters expected of her had felt somehow wrong, and no amount of meditation or deep communion with the Force had cured her of her inability to construct all the things the frustrated Healers told her she was meant to be able to do.

Before Master Keera passed, Lana was slated to go into remedial lessons. After, she never heard a word of it.

Walking alongside Obi-Wan with their hands bound behind their backs, the subterranean halls around them dimly lit by floor panels and flickering overheads, it occurs to her—or, really, it's more that she remembers a half-forgotten shard of a memory, something she had heretofore filed away as unimportant and fleeting—Master Keera's only word on the subject.

 _Pay it no mind, Padawan. They do not understand what is within you._ Keera tugged a fifteen-year-old Lana's Padawan braid, still short and unstoried, then, and traced Lana's round face with purple nails and a thoughtful moue. _I think they will in time. But until they do, trust your Master, my bratling. There is nothing wrong with you. All is as the Force wills it._

 _I wonder,_ she says to the memory of the only one in the Order who had truly believed in her. _Did the Force will this? Or is the Force's will mutable?_

Obi-Wan's arm jostles against hers. She glances at him. His gaze is thoughtful, analytical, and he dips his head slightly when he notices her. A mental tap at the edges of the bond—she loosens the Kiros shield a tad—then: _It seems that this method of shielding functions far better for you, Padawan, than the others._

 _Is that bad?_ she asks.

He smiles a tad. Faint, but it's there. _No, not at all. Merely different. There are far fewer Jedi who are suited to use the Kiros shield nowadays—there have been different demands on our persons, and until recently, many of our missions were diplomatic. Better-suited to the kind of structured balancing we have leant toward teaching in the past few centuries._

Then perhaps all is as the Force wills it. There is an irony in her voice, she knows, that she does not conceal especially well. _Or perhaps it is the blood that runs in my veins._

 _Ah, yes. The blood of a Mandalorian is the blood of a fighter, or so they say._

 _Let's hope it serves me true, because that's the entrance to a villain's lair if I've ever seen one._ She eyes the broad double doors ahead of them with some distaste. They're ugly, brutal things, bulky and inefficient, and the wide slits at the edge of either wall look hacked open—as if they were forcibly adjusted to accommodate for the chunky, crude metallic imitation of the symbol they'd seen on the patch of that guard she and Elisa had taken down.

Obi-Wan's lips thin in an attempt to tamp down on the dark amusement bubbling inside his chest. _Please, Padawan. It's only at least half a villain's lair, what with the quality of the, ah, decor._

Their banter is interrupted by the doors, which open with what Lana can only think of as a distinctly unhappy grinding of axles against axles. Halfway through, whatever internal belt smooths its way out begins to screech in protest at the force being levied against it; the doors stop opening, and their guards look between each other with a shared nervousness in the tension of their shoulders and the slight twitch in the lone uncloaked Human's eye.

"In you go, then, and quickly now," the Human snaps as the guards clear back and take a step backward. When Lana and Obi-Wan fail to move immediately, she hisses under her breath and shoves at Lana. "Get! Go! The Master is expecting you!"

"I'm going," Lana sighs, far too put-upon by the inconvenience of the half-opened door to really give any sort of appropriate consideration to how dangerous the woman could be to her person. She pauses, evaluates. _Kark it,_ she decides, glancing at the clearly-mercenary woman and her wearable-grade durasteel-toed digs. "Unless you'd like to announce me...?"

That gets her a rather painful kick in the back, one that sees her flop over the doorframe and into Maul's boudoir with an ungainly yelp and no arms available to see her land on her feet.

 _Worth it,_ she thinks, her face in the ground and her smirk thus firmly invisible. Obi-Wan steps past her with a not-too-subtle nudge to her shoulder via his boot and lifts his chin up high. Sunlight streams through a torn patch of roof right in front of the entrance, and it lights his hair a shade of auburn that makes her think of the fires of the Order's burial pyres. Beautiful things, those. If a Jedi's body happens to be retrievable, burning it with the pyre is said to release their essence into Force—to set the crude matter apart from the luminous, and by so doing enable the Jedi to have a true reunion with the Force they served in their living days.

Lana remembers this, now, with the sun shining down on Obi-Wan's head, because they had burned the pyre for Risse Keera only hours after her troops confirmed her death. Usually it took days.

It had been sunset on Coruscant when all that was left of Master Keera was released into the Force.

"Maul, dear." Obi-Wan is brazen and full of bravado. He finds his humor where he can, which in these days is no simple task. "So good to see you again. It's been too long."

"Kenobi," Darth Maul returns. He is indolent, one arm resting on the side of his chair, but he straightens and leans forward with his hands on both of the clawlike protrusions hanging from the throne of scrap metal he has to have forced his mercenaries to construct. There's no other explanation for the sheer lack of artistry, Lana thinks, but perhaps the brutalism is the point with a man like him. "What's this, now? You've brought a friend along, and she's no Skywalker. What of the tales I've heard? What of the Hero With No Fear and the Negotiator, the unbeatable team, saviors of the Republic?"

"Oh, I'm afraid Anakin couldn't make it. Life does get so busy as a General, you know. I can't say I had the time to make this visit, either—so imagine my surprise when I found I would be attending after all. What brings me here, Maul?"

Of all things, Darth Maul smiles. That it looks more like a sneer upon second examination makes far more sense to Lana. With the coldness in his eyes seeping out into the shadowed areas of the room and filling the Force with a low, looming darkness, the posture of a predator waiting to strike, a true smile would have been far more threatening—really, the scions the Dark Side chooses these days, it just doesn't make them the same—

"I've heard about your new little apprentice. Hardly here a day, and she's managed to cause chaos among my people in the capital. I was... curious. What makes a Jedi so inclined to skulk about? You must admit, your people don't exactly make good saboteurs."

She pauses in the act of rising to her feet, openly gawking at Maul, seeing Obi-Wan at the corner of her eye raising a brow at his enemy. Her heart beats fast enough that she thinks they must all be able to hear it. "What in the nine Corellian hells are you talking about?"

"Clever, child. But don't think I haven't heard about your efforts as a Shadow." He bares his teeth— _there it is,_ she thinks, her world abruptly slamming itself back down on her axis. She'd been worried for a second. "It was quite astonishing to hear from my men that not only did you manage to get to the terminal in that musty old mansion before they did, but you also set several traps to inhibit their passage out. Why, you even felled a few in the process. Ingenious thinking—I'd applaud you, if you weren't a _Jedi."_

That he nearly spits the last word is no surprise. Lana gets to her feet with a wince. Her hands are definitely shaking, and she thanks the stars that she's far enough behind Obi-Wan that he can't see them. "I haven't the slightest what you're on about, Darth, but then, I suppose I ought to expect that from a Sith, oughtn't I? Spreading lies and misinformation wherever you go... what are we really here for?"

"Yes, truly," Obi-Wan adds, dry. "You and I both have better things to do with our time than to accuse a mere Padawan of such skulduggery. Tell me, how do you feel about allowing the Gungan ambassadors passage through the swamps? Such a harmless thing—"

"Oh, I don't think so. Your democracy is a blight upon the galaxy, Kenobi, and I've gotten what I brought you here for." In the shadows where his throne rests, Maul's teeth, gleaming, look more like sharpened knives than anything. He pauses. "Just one last thing... she does look so very like her mother."

"I haven't the slightest what you're on about, as per usual," Obi-Wan retorts, breaking his cuffs and igniting his lightsaber just in time to catch Maul's blade near the hilt, blazing crimson between the light and the darkness, blue against red.

They follow each other with the practiced steps of two dancers who know each other's routines by heart.

 _I don't need to be here,_ she thinks, watching them with something in her throat, eyes tracking the elegant arcs and sweeps and parries of their 'sabers, a grand fight in an age of heroes and villains, the bright rays of the sun streaming through the cracked roof juxtaposed by the deep shadows of this ramshackle mediocrity of a throne room. All her training and all her spelunking, the many hours spent honing her skills, fighting her instincts, and she knows that she will never match this.

She is not a warrior.

She is certainly not a hero, not by any stretch.

 _But you are a Jedi._

Maybe it's herself. Maybe it's the teachings, coming to her again in her time of need. Either way, Lana swallows. She slips into Makashi and tells herself it is like a second skin, that it is like she was born for it. The unfamiliar hum of her 'saber and the gentle whisper of the kyber crystal within, its green blade framed a faint yellow in the rich beams of sunlight, all of these things feel to her like a world she does not know and a life she was not meant to inhabit.

 _(No match for a blaster at your side,_ she hears again. Ignores it.)

Then she puts all distractions out of her mind. They've got a base to not only break out of, but investigate as well—however much they can actually do that while running—and the quickest way she can see to do that, leaping out of Maul's range and allowing Obi-Wan to handle the brunt of his onslaught, is by taking down the roof.

Lana breathes out, feeling her heart beat rapidly in her chest. She's never been terribly good at levitating things with the Force, not like Master Yoda, at least. The Kiros shield shudders as all the familiar doubts begin to creep back in.

 _Not now!_ she tells herself as Maul gains on Obi-Wan, who's avoiding being backed into a corner by leading Maul around in a circular motion. _Focus, Lana, focus._

There is the Force and only the Force as she reaches out into it. She feels both Maul's attention, shifting to her, and the resulting the spike of determination from Obi-Wan, whose 'saber shaves one of Maul's horns. His kyber crystal sings as he moves, at home in the heart of battle. Although Lana can feel the tug of a vision at her senses—like the crystal itself wants to tell her something—she swallows and tightens the Kiros shield. There is only the Force and herself. Distinct, separate, but one existing within the other.

Right?

 _Do hurry, Lana,_ Obi-Wan says over the training bond. He sounds remarkably calm. She has, by now, heard enough of him to realize that it's at least partially a front. _I hate to admit it, but Maul is a fairly skilled opponent. I can tire him out, but he'll only pull on the Dark to give him fuel—be it through his anger or someone else's suffering._

It's a pointed statement.

A very pointed statement, albeit delicate, and that he has enough finesse to phrase it so carefully in the midst of battle shakes her awake more than anything else. She sends back wordless acknowledgment and reaches for the places scattered across the ceiling where she can feel life creeping in: the crawling vines, spreading and spilling, cramming themselves into places where they, too, do not belong.

Eyes closed, Lana smiles.

The ceiling, thick durasteel rusted by the ages and the jungle atop it, crumples and cracks into jagged shards of metal.

"Let's go!" she shouts, bolting for the door, gratified to hear Obi-Wan's hasty acknowledgment and Maul's angry bellow as his throne room collapses in on itself.

* * *

The first mercenary that spots them is the human woman from earlier. With wide, angry eyes, she ducks below Lana's fist, into an alcove, and slams a hand onto what can only be an alarm button. The lights lining the seams between the walls and the ceiling dim into an angry red. Obi-Wan extends a hand outward and the woman is knocked back into the wall. She slumps to the ground, unconscious from the blow, but otherwise thrumming with a steady energy.

She'll wake up, but she'll have one hell of a headache. More's the pity.

"Hey, a door." Lana leans forward, examining the block of solid durasteel, the panel next to it, and the poorly-concealed jamb hiding in the darkness of the alcove. "I've got a good feeling about this, Master."

"Of course you do," Obi-Wan murmurs. He knows her a tad better than she thinks, by now, well enough to know when she isn't being entirely truthful.

Which is most of the time.

 _Padawans._

"Pardon?" she asks, giving him a slow glance that could be read as wary in different lighting. The red shadows the sublights now cast on them make her sharp cheekbones stand out, make her look older and worn, and Maul's words play on repeat in the back of his mind: _so very like her mother, so very like her mother._

The Dark is a patient beast, waiting for eons, always waiting to strike in the places you least expect it. Perhaps Maul had guessed at some future he thought he knew, or perhaps he had come upon some trail here on Naboo—however vanishingly unlikely that possibility might be—that had led him to more interesting places, or perhaps...

Perhaps all is as the Force wills it, indeed.

He jabs at a few of the buttons on the panel. _Padawans never change, do they?_ "Oh, nothing."

"What—oh!" Lana jumps back as the door swings inward, revealing several data terminals with running holoscreens. Wasting no time, she dashes up to one of them. "These are—mining records? From... Kessel? Here, Master—" she fumbles with her datapad, hooking it up to the terminal in front of her, "—I'll just transmit this data to my 'pad. It only ought to take a standard minute."

Obi-Wan stands guard at the doorway, and after a moment of thought, leans down and lightly presses two fingers against the downed mercenary's head. She'll sleep things off long enough for them to make their way out of the corridor, but she won't be stuck in this base as it crumbles under Maul's inevitable fury at his plans being thwarted.

Small mercies. With it being wartime, it would be far more expedient of him to simply dispose of her and be done with it, and a part of him _tsks_ softly in disapproval, far too aware that one missed variable could lead to far more dire consequences.

But he is still a Jedi. Even now, in the face of so much loss, he is still what he was meant to be. Imperfect and yielding, a Master and yet a student always, but a Jedi all the same.

The Light, clear here amidst the darkness both real and metaphysical, curls around his soul.

 _Stay with me,_ he asks it, a private prayer, the penitent request of a man who, belatedly, has realized that the path he is walking goes further along than he had ever dreamed.

* * *

"It will only stop him for a little while," Obi-Wan says between breaths, a slight gleam in his eye as they run through the subterranean halls of Maul's base and leave chaos in their wake.

Cut power lines, destroyed overhead lights, data terminals sliced to pieces and guards knocked unconscious—they'd even turned a line of water sprinklers on inadvertently, a rarity anywhere outside of aqueous planets. Sure, half the excitement is the adrenaline pumping through her veins at the sheer danger presented by actually having met an obsessive Darksider with a predilection for hunting down those who leave him alive, but she can see how mission operatives would begin to cope with assignments that end up like this.

Especially when, like this one, the place of their captivity is ancient enough that quite a few things don't work right any more.

Lana blinks. Obi-Wan said something else, and she missed it in the blur of rounding a corner. "What?"

"He won't be far behind us! He's got quite a penchant for living through situations that ought to kill you!"

"Oh, wonderful," she says, and makes a sharp right.

Obi-Wan nearly falls on her as she forcibly stops her own momentum by grabbing a square pedestal with a melted control panel just outside an open entrance. Within the innocuous-looking door, hardly larger than any of the others, is a broad, durasteel-plated observation platform over a yawning abyss that extends only into darkness below. The faint shadows of giant ceracrete cylinders loom in the dim light provided by the flickering sublights set into the observation platform. Above and beyond...

"Out there," Lana says, pointing to the exit at far end of the room, where the green of the jungle shines brightly and more crawling vines have wrapped themselves around what looks to be an old unloading deck. "That's our ticket out."

"This was a plasma facility."

They can both sense the roiling dark crawling towards them with every passing moment. She turns and looks at him. "After the damage we did, they'll be forced to abandon it."

"True enough, I suppose. Look up there—do you see that?" Lana follows Obi-Wan's finger to the dark, claw-shaped object hanging from a large beam of durasteel, hard to see in the bad lighting conditions they get to deal with. He smiles a little at her dubious look. "Yes, Padawan. I am afraid _that_ is our ticket out. You'll have to ride on my back, since I'm not seeing a second claw up there."

"Delightful," she says with all the false cheer she can muster. Maul's dark, infuriated presence roils at the edges of the Kiros shield, and the Force tugs from somewhere deep within it, but she does her best to put it out of her mind as Obi-Wan kneels so she can hop on.

 _His hands had best not be clammy,_ she thinks, position firmly secured as he taps deep into his own sea of calm and leaps up, assisted by the Force. The worst that happens is the rush of air that leaves his body at the impact. He recovers well enough, and the natural incline of the beam has them rushing forward in no time.

Ahead of them, the late afternoon sun burns bright on Naboo's mountainous jungles. Lana glances back to find Maul, his expression indecipherable the further away they go, his terrible double-bladed 'saber gleaming brightly in the darkness.

 _Just like her mother,_ he had said. But how could he know anything about her? While the Jedi Order keeps records of each member's birth, both on the kyber in the heart of the old Temple and in Vokara Che's patient files, they aren't exactly easily accessible from the outside, nor are they much cared for by anyone, Jedi or no Jedi.

It is the heart of the sentient that belongs to the Order that matters, after all. Not their blood, nor their lineage.

Or, at least, it used to be like that. Certainly it was so when Lana first arrived in-Temple, hand in hand with Master Quinlan and Aayla because she was wont to start fights she couldn't win. But times have changed, and the revelation that the existence of Anakin Skywalker's children had been shook certain intra-Order factions to their core.

More and more of the "fringe cases", like that of Master Adi Gallia and her well-connected family, have begun to emerge as the war has worn on. Either she hadn't been paying attention (not a far-fetched concept) or the truth was always more complicated than it looked to the Adepts and the Padawans, who were expected to learn metaphysics, not politicking.

A guess, she decides. Her records list her mother as unknown. She is both a Mandalorian and a Jedi, unusual only for the fact that most Force-sensitive Mandalorians prefer to follow their own codes, and raise their families to that end. It would be easy enough to take a stab in the darkness at what might be true, to try and unsettle a pair of Jedi in enemy territory, to drive them to rashness and passion.

Maul would certainly try something like that.

Wouldn't he?

* * *

"I know Maul, Lana," Obi-Wan says quietly as they watch the smoke rise from the northern mountaintop that Maul's base had been hidden in. They've found safe shelter within the eaves of the forest, at least for the moment, and though it will take them several days to trek back to the capital they have at least one problem cut off at its head. "I am afraid being so mercilessly harassed by an enemy like that over a period of years leads to one getting to know them rather well. So I happen to know that while Maul twists the truth to his own benefit, he very rarely outright lies."

Lana remains silent.

"As a General of the Grand Army of the Galactic Republic, I could order you to disclose your locations and activities during the first two nights we spent on-planet. It would be within my interests, and probably the Republic's as well. We cannot have another Jedi going rogue."

He thinks her expression flickers. It's a moonless night, and too dark to tell for certain. That's well enough—he is taking care of his words very, very carefully, to ensure she will not miss an iota of what he intends.

"I will not do this," he continues after a few more moments of quiet. "I won't ask you where you've been, or what you've been doing. Part of readiness for Knighthood is knowing what steps need to be taken, and when—though should this be a concern with a candidate, Master Yoda would emphasize a lack of rashness as a benchmark, and Master Windu would strongly recommend a test of trust for a Knight's trial. If you intend to reach Knighthood, you will need that knowledge about you, and in a time of war, sometimes firsthand experience is the only way through which that might be gained. Confidence in making your split-second decisions can be the difference between life and death on the battlefield."

For the first time since he began his little speech, she dares to glance up at him. That much he can make out. "Yes, Master."

"However."

She flinches.

"I will expect you to debrief with me when we return to Coruscant after the full completion of this mission, with all of the Council who may be in attendance present—to practice what you will do as a Knight. I will furthermore expect you to report to first the Healers for an extensive workup—including the mind healers—as part of evaluating how your re-entry into active mission status has gone. Thirdly, after you have done both of these things, you will report to Master Ali Alaan for creche duty and then to Master Cin Drallig to assist him in teaching the younglings during their instructional hours. If you do not, I will hear of it, and I shall be forced to come up with something more severe. Is this understood?"

"Yes, Master," Lana says unhappily, young and not as subtle as she thinks she is.

Obi-Wan sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. A cool chill has settled into the night, and the various cuts Maul had managed to inflict upon him before their dashing escape still simmer with a heat he does not entirely like. He'll attend to it in the morning, when there's enough light to see by. "Whatever you did, Lana— _don't_ do it again. I don't fancy court-martialing our boneheaded youth left and right."

"I understand, Master," she says.

It does not escape his notice that she did not say _yes, Master._

 _Blast it all. Why do I seem to be the one with a talent for attracting rebellious lifeforms?_ he wonders, but if Qui-Gon is there, if he's listening, he says nothing.

* * *

It is easy enough to forget, in the crush of war and the maturity it demands of all sentients, that those who fight on the front lines of what is already being called the Galactic Civil War are oh-so-young. Best not to think about it too closely, or else risk giving your heart to the very definition of a hopeless cause—so it goes among most of those who have the privilege of being far off from the war's hot zones, who need only fear supply lines disrupting their favored beverages or delayed delivery times for the intergalactic Core postal services.

The galaxy at war takes on a different shape, a tenser tone, but even so, life goes on.

Thus, Qui-Gon muses, it is all too easy to forget that both the Jedi and the clones, who have stayed in the hot zones and seen the devastation, are all terribly, terribly young.

In the Force all things are timeless, and in a sense become ageless. The Force does not decay, like crude matter; it is luminous, effervescent, everlasting. A soul burning bright in it maintains constancy maintains vivacity maintains existence, both in it and a part of it, unable to ever be fully extinguished.

Quashed, yes. Suppressed for a time, yes.

This is the trick of the Dark, battling for supremacy through cyclical conflicts: conceal the Light and pretend it is not there, that it is crushed beneath the Dark's heel, that the Dark has always, truly, secretly, reigned.

Obi-Wan Kenobi sleeps under a moonless sky and does not dream. Opposite him, under the boughs of a swaying tree, is a trick of the Force's own. Qui-Gon watches, both there and not, with his Padawan always and yet a part of something greater in which he needs no name—something greater that resonates in the heart of Lana Viszka Ruhr, her brow marred in slumber and her lips curved down in some unknown displeasure.

While Obi-Wan is one with Light, one with the pure, unfiltered intensity of it, the same as he had emitted in the early days before his temper proved consistent and stormy, Lana is... murkier. Not a shadow, not a diaphanous beam; instead the Force's gamble crackles with something uneasy and contentious, stood at the knife's edge and poised to tip off should the balance be swayed in either direction.

Qui-Gon had never held much regard for the vagaries of a bloodline. He always found the politicians who stressed such things to be vague and unconvincing in his diplomatic assignments. Not even the common stereotypes— _the blood of a Mandalorian is the blood of a fighter_ a notable one among them—had much swayed him from his opinion in life.

He runs a fond hand through Obi-Wan's hair as he once had after a particularly bad mission had gone south somewhere near Sygeeto and _Padawan_ Kenobi had been laid up in the medical bay for weeks.

It passes through the strands without catching on any, a mere breeze ruffling the fringe, and right on cue, Obi-Wan's brows crinkle in a half-response.

 _You both were and are young,_ Obi-Wan, he murmurs. _I hold out hope that you will one day remember that. I hope that you will remember the courage that once led you to defy both me and the Council—the courage that drove you to try to end a war, in all your bright, furious compassion._

* * *

 **I've been sitting on this for so long it feels like my eyes are going to melt if I have to look at it any longer. I generally believe a story ought to be able to stand on its own rights without needing additional text to be understood, but given as I'm purposely publishing this fic serially and my goal is to revise upon completion, I'll deviate from the usual worldbuilding-only notes and mention that I'm deliberately slowing the pace to one thread per chapter. Each individual thread of events is important enough that they all deserve due consideration, and I wouldn't want to skimp on Anakin and Ahsoka just because I felt like they were bloating the contents of the chapter beyond what was totally necessary. And don't think I've forgotten about Yoda or Dooku, either...**

 **Just keep in mind: this probably isn't going to go the way you think, to paraphrase a certain cantankerous Jedi Master.**

 **By the by, since AO3 lets you do this and FFN does not, the projected chapter count for this fic is currently somewhere between 40~45 chapters. Subject to increase, but that's my current limit for myself.**


	20. Chapter 19

Daud Antema settles on the rough-spun beige couch in his Temple apartment—one of the lower-level ones, the ones all the Temple staff are quartered in, even Jedi staff—and sets his comm down on the low table.

"Any minute now, Elisa," he mutters, eyes drifting to the holo display on his bedside table. _22:49._ Usually he'd call it off and record a message for her later, continuing their game of holocorded letters, but tonight is different. His little sister, his _royal guard_ of a sister, had sent him a short, clipped comm just a few standard cycles ago: _Have been appointed tertiary royal bodyguard by the captain. Met the Jedi. Near injured myself. Foiled a plot against the Queen. Talk later._

Her becoming a royal guard at all, much less a tertiary bodyguard, in the time he's been gone aside, _met the Jedi_ can only mean that she's met Master Kenobi and Lana, who's certainly spent enough time chatting with him in the hangar bay. _I've never been to Naboo, what is it like? Mandalore's cities are beautiful. The outside... not so much. How long is the hyperspace route? Are there faster ways? How did you figure that out?_

She's still the most inquisitive Jedi out of all the ones he's met. Not terribly possessed of temperance, either, but then it seems like a lot of them have less of that than they would like to admit. Daud has begun to learn the art of reading the Jedi, and as much as they walk worlds with those hollow, ageless eyes that spook spacers, they are as much sentients as anyone else in the galaxy.

But patience is not exactly a great quality of their younger crop.

The Temple Jedi, he's learnt, haven't taken very many missions to Naboo since the battle that took place in Theed just about a decade ago. He had been off-planet with his family at the time, visiting old family friends on Alderaan, and the details of it still escape him. Being off-planet most of its calendar year will do that.

Elisa is hardly the same. Back when he'd had D-760 to guide his flights through space and spent longer stretches of time at home around the Festival of Light, she would use his astromech to record the notes she was taking on whatever historical subject she'd taken to learning about.

Trying to listen to them was an exercise in bewilderment. Maybe starting in the middle wasn't the best idea, but an extended recording on the establishment of the Techno Union and its century-old bailout deals with Naboo-based shipping companies had put him right to sleep, and he had been _working_ for one of those companies. The most he'd learned about was their trades with the Gungans, unusual prior to the peace treaty between the Gungans and the Naboo, and even then... _ugh,_ he thinks. _Too many small details._

At long last, the comm buzzes. Elisa's image flickers into view when he accepts the call and fuzzes out for a moment before refocusing. She looks tired, but that's not unusual. _"Brother, you're looking healthy."_

"I've been working at the Jedi Temple, but you knew that. _I_ didn't know that you were working with the royal guard! When did that happen?"

 _"...Well, it happened."_

Daud gives her a raised brow. Elisa sighs.

 _"To make a long story short, the captain and I busted a few thugs here in Theed, and after that, I was offered a job. But you're up late on your rest day for a reason, aren't you?"_

"Well..." His caf is still sitting on the table from before he'd hopped into the sonic shower; he takes a swig out of the mug and takes his time swallowing. "I'd like to hear the news from home, if it wouldn't be too much trouble. I won't be able to come back until just about Festival."

Elisa nods, a small, ironic smile flickering across her face. _"I'm sure it's no surprise, but Ahuva won't be coming to Festival. The Jedi girl—Lana, was it?—uncovered some things in the course of our foiling an assassination attempt that still have the southern courts in a furor. Speaking of."_

Oh, he has a _bad_ feeling about this.

 _"Lana is a Jedi, Daud,"_ Elisa tells him with eyes that are too knowing, even in holographic form. _"But she's more than that. Be very careful."_

"What do you mean?" he asks, fingers twitching on his caf.

 _"I worked with her on a job. After hours. Outside the palace. We just happened to save the Queen in the process, you understand?"_

Because Elisa seems to be waiting for a response, and because Daud is no real stranger to the kinds of gray areas Elisa (and Lana, clearly, however much she pretends otherwise) tends to run in, he sets his caf down on the table. "I do."

 _"Just be careful, Daud. Please."_

"I'm always careful." Daud leans forward and holds her doubtful gaze, trying to muster up more confidence than he's entirely sure he has. "Believe in me, little sister. I'm doing my best to be responsible."

 _"It's not your sense of_ responsibility _I question, brother mine."_ She wrinkles her nose at him the way she used to when they were children, before she'd gotten that scar on her neck, before the three Antema siblings had discovered the unfortunate truth that love is not always enough to keep a family cohesive.

Daud laughs too lightly and feels the galaxy at the edges of his mind. Learning to work with the Jedi in their halidom comes with its own set of habits and half-truths. "She'll be knighted soon, anyways. After she gets back from Naboo, she's due to start the ceremonial processes, and after that, she'll be out in the galaxy."

Elisa gives him a half-lidded glare, brows raised to accentuate the effect. _"And how many other Jedi apprentices have you kept up with in that detail?"_

"It's getting late, I'm afraid. I'm on call all morning _and_ afternoon tomorrow."

 _"You've developed some bad habits in the time you've been away..."_

"I just—" Daud stops and sighs, running a hand through his hair. "I know. I know to be careful. I _do,_ Elisa," he adds at her doubtful face. "I don't know what you want me to say. She offered me a job after everything happened at Coruscant General and the Jedi are keeping me safe—my face is _still_ showing up on the HoloNet after that report by the Galactic Enquirer. All that's happening is that she keeps me company when she has a spare moment."

Elisa makes a humming noise. _"How's your work? What's it like?"_

They go on to talk long into his night cycle, but he never quite shakes Elisa's hesitation out of his mind, or the look in her eyes when she'd mentioned the job she and Lana worked on together, deep in the night of Naboo. Theed is a calm city—the Goddess Mahendré watches over it and brings it the light of two of the three moons to see by at night, or so they say, but in the season before the Festival of Light, Theed is plunged into thick darkness every evening as the planet's turning sees the cities of the southern courts face all three moons at once.

Most of Theed's denizens opt to stay indoors, even if they aren't strictly at home. _Dark nights for dark business_ is a phrase that gets tossed around during the season, usually jokingly, but some take it literally enough.

Elisa doesn't talk much about her odd jobs. He's not even entirely sure what _exactly_ she gets up to, nor is he sure he wants to, but he does know she's had jobs from the nobles of Naboo before—enough to know her way around a few more well-to-do areas of Theed than an otherwise average traveler might. She doesn't flinch at much.

If whatever Lana did on this job of hers was enough to give Elisa pause and drive her to warn him about the one person he can't seem to get out of his mind...

Daud sighs, ambling over to the decades-old control panel set into the wall, and dims the lights to the lowest possible setting he can.

"You're something else," he says to the air, closing his eyes and stretching out with what is inside of him. His awareness is nothing like a Jedi's, but he can feel the movement of life around him, a shifting sea of powerful signatures that all blend together in a tenuous balance that feels strange and fragile.

Morning will come soon. Then another day of pilot work, taking various Jedi wherever they need to go on-planet. If he's lucky, he'll be able to squeeze in a few standard hours before the day begins, but he's definitely going to need extra caf.

* * *

The first deviation in the working day of Daud Antema starts when Mace Windu strides into the hangar bay and makes for the bay manager's office like a nerf is hot on his tail. Daud glances at his coworker Kes, who shrugs and slides back under a U-wing, and then to the Temple entrance to the bay, where two more Jedi hover uncertainly.

"Need some help?" he asks one of them, a young-looking Knight who jumps at being addressed.

"No," the other, much older and far more drawn-looking, says, short and clipped. She shoots the other Knight a warning glance. "Please, return to your duties. We rely on mechanics and pilots like yourself in these trying times."

Daud nods. Probably too slowly, because she gives him a suspicious look, but he heads back to his toolbox and fishes out his hydrospanner in order to get to work. The Jedi are unusually agitated, shifting in place. He feels—something, a presence, lurking at the edge of his consciousness. A glance in the direction of the likely culprits: sure enough, the older Knight is staring at him with the too-intent eyes of someone assessing a threat.

"Are you sure I can't help you?" he calls.

"Knight Faldur is on a mission that does not technically require a pilot," says a voice from behind. Mace Windu strides into view, crossing his arms as he meets Daud's eyes. "I, on the other hand, will almost certainly need one. Are you up for a trip to the Senate?"

"Yes, sir. Kes has things handled here." Kes kicks a foot in acknowledgment, not bothering to slide back out for this change of pace.

Mace nods and sets off for one of the fancier-looking four-seat speeders of the lot they've got. Both Knights traipse after him. Daud follows, the odd weight of the galaxy a constant presence in the back of his mind, and wonders for a moment what it might have been like had his parents made the choice to send him to the Jedi when he was a child.

Perhaps then—

Well. _Perhaps_ is the realm of many things, most of them intangible, and he has a job to do. Not to mention the life he'd had every intention of getting back to at some point before nearly dying at the hand of a Force-crazed assassin.

* * *

"I should warn you now, Antema. Missions I undertake tend to complicate themselves quickly, even on Coruscant. Be prepared for anything—and most importantly, be prepared to— _duck!"_ Mace shouts the last bit as rockets scream through the Coruscanti sky.

Daud jerks the yoke downward, glad for how smoothly Jedi transport speeders glide under duress, and waits until the rockets have safely sailed ahead of them to pull up and even with the rest of traffic, who, to a sentient, seem to be little more than mildly annoyed at the disturbance. One masked rider shouts taunts at him in Huttese, a few horns blare above and under him, but for the most part, the airlanes just widen a bit around them. This suits the Jedi just fine, judging by the hint of approval in Mace's stern demeanor and the raised brow of the older Knight behind him.

"You were saying?" Daud asks, hoping he's coming across more smoothly than he feels he is. The sharp left turn he has to make at the bend around Ecopublica One feels easier to make than a dream; half of him, probably the half that always throws sense out the window when he's under fire, feels as if he may actually _be_ dreaming.

Mace smiles. Just a tad, but it's there. "I see you've already been through the preparatory course."

"I do my best, Master Windu. I've seen a fair few fights in my time."

"Easy to tell—you handle yourself acceptably. As I was saying... be prepared to fight. This war has dragged on for long enough. The people feel it, too. Occasionally, that leads to violence we Jedi usually try to prevent." His eyes are distant when Daud shoots him a quick glance, but when he looks again they are as sharp and piercing as ever. "Be on your guard, all of you. Faldur, Dar Skan—once we get to the Senate building, I want you on high alert. Is that understood?"

"Of course, Master Windu," Dar Skan—the younger of the two, apparently—supplies.

"Something about this feels—off." The strange tension in Faldur's signature makes sense now. As the Senate comes into view, Daud hears a low hum that seems to be emanating from it; his only clue that it is Force-based is the muted silence everything else falls into when he casts out his thoughts in its direction.

Strange, to be certain, and not unlike that night in the Coruscant General Hospital. But Mace says nothing, and Dar Skan's rippling shoulders are visibly tense in the rearview mirror, and again Daud begins to feel as if the galaxy is nothing like he once understood it to be, even as it has shown him its color and shape in all his wanderings.

He breathes in, then out. His gloved fingers are firmly on the yoke.

"So, Master Windu," he says with a calm cheer he hardly feels. "Who's requested the Jedi at the Senate this time? Last I heard, they were none too happy with the findings of the Jedi investigation..."

"I suppose it's fortuitous that we're bringing you along. The delegation from Naboo has requested a meeting with the Council—but as you may have noticed, I'm the only one currently on-planet and available. We'll pick the delegation up and escort them to a location of their choosing." Mace pauses. The Force ripples.

"We'd better lose our tail first," Dar Skan says from the back with the same battle-worn, brittle amusement that makes a home for itself in the voices of all those who have walked with danger.

"Good call," Knight Faldur mutters. "Antema, I hope your piloting skills are up to snuff. These pieces of bantha chisszk aren't going to give up on us easily."

"What, you have a history with them?"

"You could say that." That's all she has time to say before three individual speeders break from the lower airlanes and start making their way toward the Jedi.

Daud's hands tighten on the yoke. He hasn't flown like this in a long while, but he's more than willing to rise to the occasion.

* * *

It takes some fancier flying than usual to duck and weave through Coruscanti traffic, especially with the skill of their disgruntled assailants, but soon enough Daud manages to trick one into flying into the support beam of a building. Wincing at the destruction, he steers the transport toward the Senate docks. The other two, faced with the choice to continue what had at first seemed a lucrative investment or to invest in something that guarantees a longer livelihood, both swerve out of the upper airlane and melt into the swift-moving currents of midday traffic. Soon enough, it's as if they had never been attacked in the first place.

Dar Skan relaxes. Marginally. "They could come back."

"To be frank, my concern is the Senate building," Faldur says. Her eyes are as pensive as a Jedi's can be, at least judging by the rearview mirror. A short silence goes by as they approach the docks, and after a moment, her frown deepens. "You can feel it, can't you?"

"I can. But look—Senator Amidala is waiting. We must focus our minds on the mission at hand." Mace nods to where an entourage is arrayed around a lone figure in regal purple, standing straight-backed and proud, and with a jolt Daud realizes that it had not only been _a_ Senator that requested a Jedi meeting and escort, it had been Padmé Amidala-Skywalker—longtime representative of _his_ homeworld.

 _The people you meet when you work with the Jedi,_ he thinks to himself, eyes a little wider than before. Then a far worse thought occurs to him. _I hope those agitators don't try to make another attempt while I've got the Senator in here..._

Still, he lands without incident. Mace disembarks with grace and bows as Senator Amidala approaches and her entourage falls back. "Senator. It's good to see you safe."

"Was there concern that I might not be?" she asks, her tone light, a politican's crafted smile resting on her lips.

"You are an important player in the push for peace, and we live in dangerous times. We just escaped an attempt on our lives thanks to our pilot here." Mace gestures to Daud, who dips his head in deference. "Let's proceed. We have a lot to cover."

The Senator's face takes on a hard set, or perhaps she just lets it show a little more, but either way, she nods in agreement. "You are correct, Master Windu. This meeting will take some time."

"Just show me the way, ma'am, and I'll get us there. As sure as the Goddess Mahendré watches over us." Daud stops himself from reaching up to tuck his hair back behind his ears, choosing instead to pat the yoke of the transport with a smile. He may not know how to control the Force or walk among royalty, but he is, if nothing else, a fairly decent pilot.

Dar Skan shuffles from his end of the back seat to sit closer to Faldur. The Senator's smile grows a little more genuine as she climbs into the transport. "I take it you're from Naboo?"

"I am, Senator. Thank you for all your efforts—my family and I appreciate what you do," Daud says as he revs the repulsothrusters and eases out of the Senate dock, privately thankful for the return to the air and for the distance from the harsh gleam of the fancy senatorial chromium ship hulls and the shiny industrial-grade flooring that has somehow avoided being scuffed despite years of heavy-duty landings.

"It's heartening to know that my people stand behind me, and even more so to know that our ties with the Jedi remain strong." Her brilliance is even more apparent in-person than it is from HoloNet news coverage, her sharp mind blazing like a beacon of light, and he finds himself glad for it.

In the Core, the war is old news. Distant news, far removed from any kind of connection that might make it personal, render it visceral; the Battle of Coruscant was years ago, and the Separatists have long kept away from the galaxy's inner circle. Indeed, some Senators, their homeworlds sufficiently far enough from the front lines, almost seem to forget that there is a war at all. Senator Amidala-Skywalker's intent focus on _ending_ it has made little headway since the death of General Grievous.

Daud doesn't know all the details, but he's kept up with the HoloNet reports ever since the night that Fulcrum saved him from near-certain death. For some Coreward Senators, they almost seem _more_ inclined to war—statistically, since the beginning of the war, mining planets and agricultural centers like Bandomeer have been sources of profit for such parties, even if the planets themselves never see the wealth.

His Senator, on the other hand, has never given up in her pursuit of a resolution to the conflict, despite the weight of those who fight against her. As much as he spends most of his life away from his homeworld, he loves it dearly, and to see it represented so well warms his heart.

"The Jedi have taken good care of me," Daud agrees, feeling somewhat lame. If he had much to say, he certainly wouldn't want to try and express it in this context, where even a simple ride is a hazardous venture. His deeper words often take too much time to be spoken while on the move.

"Senator," Knight Faldur says. Her posture is still ramrod straight. She tilts her head to the side, as if hearing something beyond hearing, and perhaps she can. On the surface she looks like a fairly nondescript humanoid, but there is something to the sharpness of her eyes and her almost hawklike features that makes him think it might be otherwise. "Is there any kind of disturbance in the Senate building at the moment?"

Senator Amidala-Skywalker frowns. "No, I don't believe so. Unless you mean the ongoing court caucus, in which case I'd have to say it'd almost certainly be so, because very few of the legislators involved in that are what you might consider 'orderly'..."

"That might explain it. My thanks, Senator." She still looks troubled, but whatever her musings are, she puts them aside.

The Senator leans forward in her seat to direct Daud every so often— _right here, under this skybridge, stay left at the fork_. A mildly uncomfortable silence settles in. Mace doesn't seem like the sort to be interested in making conversation, Knight Faldur and the Senator seem preoccupied by their thoughts, and Dar Skan is on high alert, eyes scanning the perimeter.

Still, as things go, piloting in silence under the late afternoon sky is not the most terrible social situation he's ever been in. Possibly the among the most absurd, but certainly not the most terrible.

* * *

The second deviation in the working day of Daud Antema comes when, instead of being directed to drop his passengers off at the landing deck of the unassuming, squat, three-level building a level below Coruscant's skyscrapers, Senator Amidala-Skywalker gestures instead for him to maneuver the ship into the building's hangar bay.

"I would like you to come with us," the Senator explains when she spots Daud's quizzical look in the mirror. "Call it curiosity. I would appreciate the perspective of one of my people in these matters."

Mace frowns. "Senator, I must object to this. Antema is not a Jedi, and what we have to discuss is not exactly accessible to the uninformed. We don't have time to get him caught up."

"Ah, but if I'm not mistaken, he has a stake in this fight already. Do you not, Mr. Antema? You are the one who survived the attack on the Coruscant General." The Senator turns to Daud with a determined gleam in her eyes.

Daud pulls up flush with the entrance to the hangar bay, crosses his arms and sighs. He thinks of Elisa and of the scar on her neck that had been a fresh wound when he first saw it, puckered and nasty even with the judicious application of bacta.

There is no impersonal war, not in his mind, not with what he's seen, but he had figured that his best chance of doing some good in the midst of it was the small, simple, everyday tasks that keep the Jedi hangar bay running—maintenance, supply-running, piloting, and all the rest. "Truthfully, Senator, Master Jedi, I have a stake in the war ending, at the very least. Fulcrum was the one to save me from the attack, and after that, I couldn't exactly look away any more. If I can be any kind of aid to your efforts, I will be a glad man. I've at least kept up with the news as it happens," he adds, more as an afterthought than anything else.

Mace watches him for an unnervingly long moment. Daud feels a presence poking at his mind, poring over its outward surface, attempting to discern its make. He waits. He may not be able to do much, but he would at least like to do _something._

"Well, we're wasting enough time sitting here," Mace says eventually, leaning back in his synthleather seat, crossing his fingers. "What are you waiting for, Antema? Get us parked."

"Right away, sir," Daud says. In the back, the Senator smiles victoriously; the Jedi ignore it as politely as they can, Faldur looking rather as if something has soured in her mouth, and the hair on his arms prickles at the uncomfortable spike of resentment that floats briefly in the Force surrounding them.

* * *

The opulent, hexagonal room the Senator eventually leads Mace Windu and his entourage into is windowless, but well lit. On every adjacent seam, there are long, skinny light panels set to a soft, warm glow. Each of them crawls up the length of the walls and meet each other on the angular, domed ceiling. Daud notices first the pattern of the deep booths set up along the walls, momentarily transfixed by the way they sit carefully in the shadowy inclines created by the room's shape, covering its innermost seating from any proper view.

He notices second the tall woman with blonde hair, seated in a booth to the left, and for one gobsmacking moment his world begins to slide off its axis, because—

 _Lana?_

But it can't be. The clothes are too elaborate, for one, and the headpiece the woman's hair is woven around too fine—and, wait, Lana doesn't wear headpieces, anyways. Daud swallows, trying to breathe lightly enough to attract no attention and to get his heartbeat back under control at the same time.

Mace, in front of him, stops short a respectful distance away from the table. There's a tension in the set of his shoulders and his jaw that might have been unnoticeable if it had not been for the spiky defense present among each of the Jedi, buzzing his untrained senses often enough that he is reminded of it. They are _very_ good at controlling their body language, which, he supposes, must be easier when one has the Force to release their irritation into.

"Duchess Satine Kryze," Senator Amidala-Skywalker says as the leader of Mandalore rises to greet the Jedi. "Thank you for coming today."

"It is a pleasure, my friend," Satine says with a small smile on her face, and Daud finds himself glad he's in the back of the retinue. It gives him a moment to compose himself. For her part, Satine turns to the Jedi. "Master Windu, Masters Jedi. I believe we've something to discuss, do we not? Please, let's be seated."

 _Kriff,_ Daud thinks in awe, _this woman could_ be _Lana. Give it twenty years or so._

When they've all found their seats and a waiter has brought them drinks and tiny delicacies that are engulfed by the huge plates they sit on, Satine clears her throat and leans forward. In a motion that can only be deliberate, she rests an elbow on a small circle set into the table. It _clicks,_ and the familiar soothing noises of a privacy bubble spring to life. "Master Windu, let us cut straight to the heart of the matter, as neither of us can afford to be away from our domains for long. I understand that the Jedi have been undertaking an internal investigation into the matter of the Chancellor's death, and as per the words of my colleague here, its findings have some very disturbing implications for the Galactic Republic."

"Yes." Mace lets out a small sigh, his eyes drifting to Daud for a moment, then down to the table for a moment with a sudden weariness he probably doesn't intend to be evident. He steeples his fingers against each other. "We do, indeed, have significant reason to believe that the Chancellor was at the very least an active collector—and user—of Dark objects, if not more sinister activities. Our Shadows are taking on the most dangerous parts of the investigation, following tips from our main investigators, and so far, the money trail supports the evidence."

"Which brings us to the current situation." Senator Amidala-Skywalker crosses her arms over her chest. "Many of my fellow Senators were against the investigation from the beginning, and they would rather bury their heads in the sand than be forced to confront the fact that the Chancellor was up to something. They'll use the war as an excuse to put a moratorium on the report if it's brought before them officially—that, and the fact that a Padawan was a co-investigator. This war never should have started in the first place, and it's long past time we end it. Especially when it looks like the Republic has to clean house."

Daud looks between all three leaders in turn as they consider that prospect in silence for a moment.

 _Being here is madness,_ he thinks, resisting the urge to comb his fingers through his hair. _Elisa wouldn't believe me if I told her about this._

 _Lana might._

Finally (although Daud is sure most of the acute tension exists primarily in his mind), Satine nods. "And that would be why I am here today. As part of the Alliance of Independent Systems, I am a neutral party in your war, and it would be in the best interests of all parties present—as well as quite a few of those not—that the war finally comes to an end. I have spoken to representatives from the Confederacy who are willing to come to a compromise, and those within the Senate," she glances at the Senator, whose answering smile is determined and flinty, "who would do the same. The trick of this, Master Jedi, is the other parties within the Senate who have covert interests in continued conflict."

"The war profiteers," Mace acknowledges, his tone heavy.

"Yes. Arms dealers, those with ties to Hutt Space, and the like. They will not be easy to contend with. But that is why we want you, the Jedi, to be an active part of what we intend to do."

"How long has this been in the works?" Knight Faldur breaks in, ignoring Mace's quelling glance. She looks between the Senator and the Duchess with some agitation. "Were we at all aware of this prior to this meeting?"

"Knight Faldur," Mace says, placing a warning hand on her shoulder.

Satine raises an eyebrow. "Long enough that we attempted to contact Master Yoda about it before his most recent deployment to the field. Unfortunately, he was unavailable to meet us in person at the time, and our message was too sensitive to be left to a comm call."

"...I see," Knight Faldur says, unhappily, and sits back. "Please, continue."

"Gladly. The Jedi and the Alliance share common ideals, specifically that of peace. Before your transformation into warriors, you were guardians of the peace." Her speech patterns, Daud think, have been tailored to perfection. Her accent is every bit a Core politician's, all steely formality and cool distance. "In pursuit of this, I would ask that you take up that mantle again, as you did in eras of old. Call your Jedi back from the field—"

"—and leave our men hanging?" Mace asks, not aghast, not quite, but certainly displeased by the prospect. "I mean no disrespect, Duchess, but were we to do that, we would then be negotiating losers' concessions, not a compromise. Surely you must see that, despite your pacifistic views."

Satine gives him a droll look. "Of course I can, Master Jedi. There is rhyme to my reason. The Confederacy has expressed a willingness to do the same in conflict zones outside its boundaries, and its leader—Count Dooku, I'm sure you remember—has finally taken an active interest in its internal affairs. The Count is many things, and I would argue that a fool is not among them. For there to be no more war, the Confederacy must honor any promises it makes to withdraw forces."

 _"The Count,"_ Mace stresses, something unpleasant crossing his face, "is a Sith Lord."

"I am not an expert on the affairs of the Jedi, but I have learned quite a bit in my time working with your own. When I met personally with the Count, he did not seek seek to build a false friendship with me, nor did he try to weave in any grabs for power. Certainly the man is not Light, not like a Jedi," Satine says, blithely ignoring the way all three Jedi startle at her use of their terminology. "But I have my own people who can sense the Force's currents. Whatever else he had in mind, they assure me he was at least honest in his interest in a ceasefire."

 _There are Force-sensitives on Mandalore,_ Lana had told Daud and Kes one afternoon in the hangar, a shadow in her eyes. Under them, too. She definitely hadn't slept that day. _Not quite like me, but close enough. Legend has it that they guard the Darksaber—a lightsaber used to defend the planet in times of antiquity._

He hadn't asked further. Kes, for their part, knew enough to change the subject to a lighter topic.

Still, seated among the Jedi and two politicians with direct experience with the Force, Daud finds himself wondering how cut and dry Force-sensitivity truly is. He can sense it, but interacting with it is a different matter; Lana dreams, both in the waking world and in sleep, but runs into difficulty with using the Force to guide her 'saber-work. Some of her agemates, as she'd called them, rely on it to guide them to old things in forgotten places, and very little for anything else; still others interact with it most closely in combat, or at the very least a simalcrum of it.

All of that ignores even the things he's seen on his trade runs, ferrying plasma from Naboo to all sorts of locations across the galaxy—including places he's now certain had been locuses for the Force. Put together, it's enough to start a tentative theory to work in his mind.

"We'll pull Skywalker and a few others," Mace is saying with a deep frown. "If Dooku pulls his forces after the announcement of this... peace summit, then we'll pull a few more. I cannot risk the integrity of the Republic failing people in the hot zones of this conflict, Duchess. Entire systems rely on the supply lines that Jedi are keeping open. Pulling them all relies far too much on an optimism that we frankly cannot risk in these times."

Satine inclines her head gracefully, her posture immaculate. "Naturally, I do understand, Master Jedi, whatever my personal disagreements may be. Your cooperation is the key to all of this working. And none of us have the luxury of letting things come between us, given the stakes."

"You speak with wisdom, Duchess. I hope that Count Dooku will not prove as duplicitous in this matter as he has in the past."

Daud glances at Senator Amidala-Skywalker, whose flinty grimace has begun to resemble something like a real smile. She catches his eye and nods—for what exactly, he isn't sure. A confirmation of her later collection of his opinion? A general sort of nod?

Either way, she addresses the table when she speaks. "My battle has been nothing compared to the sacrifices those in the field have made, but those sacrifices are what make it all the more important to me to end this war and restore justice to the Republic. I'll be doing everything in my power to pull supporters from the other camp in the Senate to our cause, but I wouldn't be in a position to do that without your cooperation. Thank you, Duchess, Master Windu."

"Candor from a politician?" Mace asks. "The old guard would have eaten that attitude alive."

"Well, then. Maybe it's time for things to change. Let the old practices die." The Senator's eyes blaze with a righteous fire, and Daud fully believes—as if he didn't before—that if Padmé Naberrie Amidala-Skywalker truly wanted to, she could pull Mahendré's moons out of the sky and rearrange them to her liking.

 _That,_ he thinks, _is a very good person to have on your side. And not on the enemy's._

* * *

When they exit, they find the speeder in pieces and no evidence of the culprit.

Daud stares as the hangar master explains to an extremely unamused Mace Windu that there had simply been a loud explosion, and the next thing anyone knew, the Jedi transport was blasted into smithereens, and oh, Master Jedi, what a mess, please wait, I'll requisition something fitting immediately...

 _I could've died. Again,_ he thinks, feeling a little light-headed, looking at and past each of his party's faces. _If the Senator hadn't pulled me into that discussion, I probably would've been sitting there, in the pilot's seat, and I would have died._

 _Oh, Mahendré, keep me safe and light my path._

* * *

Later, at the Senator's insistence, Daud finds himself escorting her and the Duchess to her floor at the 500 Republica.

"Mr. Antema," the Senator says as they wait for the lift to make its way down from the 398th floor. "My apologies for pulling you into that out of the blue, but I had a feeling your presence was important somehow."

"You were certainly right, Senator," Daud says, still a little shaken. His hand darts up to tug on his hair. He doesn't try to stop himself this time.

"Among friends, I go by Padmé. Satine can attest to that." Padmé glances at the Duchess, who nods, that same small, genuine smile that Lana wears lighting up her face. "At any rate, I had a question for you. Your incident at the Coruscant General is mentioned in the dossier on the Chancellor."

Daud nods, slowly, with the distinct feeling that he's not going to like wherever she's headed with this. "Yes..."

"You were saved by a Fulcrum, known starrunner, yes?"

"As far as I know, Se-Padmé," he corrects hastily at her stern look.

"This... Fulcrum. Did you get any sense of what they looked like? How tall they were, how many appendages they had?"

He casts back through his memory to the events of that night and frowns. "There was so much going on, it's all a bit of a blur. But... I think they may have been on the shorter side. Shorter than me, at any rate. Much better with a blaster, certainly."

"I see." Her face is even as she takes the information in and digests it. "Thank you. You've been very helpful."

"I'm sorry I can't be of more help," he says, stuffing his hands into his pockets.

"Oh, I meant it. One other thing, though." The lift door slides open and Satine strides into it without hesitation. Padmé turns as soon as she's in the door, her gaze piercing right through Daud. "If you intend to keep working with the Jedi, be very certain that you know when to hold your own and when to let things go. They can be tough to put up with, but the benefits are very rewarding."

"Y-yes, of course..."

Padmé smiles. He's never quite been kept so thoroughly off-balance. "Keep that in mind. May the Force be with you."

The lift door slides shut. Daud is left in his scrubby pilot jacket and trousers, his heart pounding damn near in his throat as he wonders what the hell that's supposed to _mean_ and tries to combat the sinking feeling that he already knows exactly what that means—he just doesn't know how _she_ knows.

 _You know,_ a memory of Lana says, idly scribbling something on that dreadful jury-rigged datapad she's so fond of, _Master Kenobi really is an awful gossip given the right opportunity. I've heard an awful lot of dirt about the greenhouses. But then, I've heard an equal amount about the intricacies of the Skycrawlers—Skywalker's kids, sorry—and their seeming obsession with ripping out patches of his beard, so at least he's an equal-opportunity offender._

Daud sighs. "This would be the kind of thing that happens to me. First the dianoga, then my ship, then the hospital, and now this."

If nothing else, the Force has to have a sense of humor. What kind of sense would his life make otherwise?

* * *

 **Well, this is a colossus of a chapter by my standards. We're getting closer to the big event I've been waiting for since I started writing this in earnest! As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Drop a comment! :)**


	21. Chapter 20

"This is a hell of a thing to be getting right now, Master Windu," Anakin Skywalker tells Mace Windu's holographic representation, shooting a glance in the direction of Ahsoka and Rex, who stand out of range of the holoprojector's motion sensors. "We've just gotten a lead on Dooku—he was investigating something here on this dust ball—"

"I am aware, Skywalker. Unfortunately, the Order needs you here on Coruscant. We will be deploying a special task force to Jakku to investigate what you've found—rest assured that we will not let the implications of such a facility existing escape us."

"And my men?"

Mace watches him carefully. Anakin holds himself taut, meeting the man's gaze. He's been under that judgment too many times to count, and it never really gets easier.

 _I fear for my mother, sir._

The memory makes his breath hitch, but only for a moment.

Some things do get easier. Even when you don't want them to.

"If I recall correctly, you've already got a mixed group of specialists," Mace says. "We'll need someone of Captain Rex's caliber to hold the southeastern front. It'll be procedure as usual. They come back with you, and after a rest period, they'll split off to another mission."

Underneath his words is a questioning tone even Anakin catches onto, a _why are you asking this_ and _will you force me to investigate_ kind of tone, and some part of him deeply resents that after all this time, one of the men who has been in authority over him for most of his life still regards him with suspicion.

Anakin never asked to be the center of so much. But he's learned that the Force very rarely stops to consider what you want out of existence: it takes your mother and gives you the closest thing you've ever had to a father, it exchanges one prison for another, it gives you a little sister and you have to watch her leave you, it leads you to the most beautiful woman in the galaxy and then circumstance keeps the two of you apart from each other for years and years, long enough that you miss your children beginning to walk and talk. All in search of something beyond sentient reckoning, beyond anything he is qualified to name, a boy who didn't pay any attention in long metaphysics seminars in one of the ivory spires of a narrow Order's halidom.

Metaphysics are theory, and he is nothing if not built for action.

"Understood," he says, something souring in his mouth.

The call ends. Anakin, Ahsoka, and Rex stand alone in a dusty tent on Jakku, blinking at each other in the fading light coming through the tent flap. With her helmet off, Ahsoka looks drawn, and the part of him that had been not only her Master but her friend wants to reach out and find what has her signature teetering on the edge. But her mind is closed to him.

He tries to swallow. "Well, then."

"Guess we're going to have to figure something out," Rex says, looking about as pleased as Anakin does.

Ahsoka steps forward, drawing their attention. "About that."

"Sni—Ahsoka?" Anakin asks, brows raising.

"I thought something like this might happen. Knowing how our luck tends to go, and all." Ahsoka's smirk is not a pale shadow of what it once was, not exactly, but there are shadows at the corners of her lips that hadn't been there before. "Do you trust me, Anakin?"

He hasn't heard her voice in years. She walked back into his life without an explanation— _she doesn't owe me one,_ the charitable part of him thinks—and she's planning what the Senate is sure to characterize as insurrection.

What happens after the war?

Everything keeps coming back to the thrice-bedamned _war._ A war he hasn't been able to win, despite fighting on the front lines for most of his life as an adult. A war whose principal opposing figures escape by the skin of their teeth every time, just a bit too neatly. Whose existence has brought unimaginable pain and suffering to millions... and whose continuation, he is not unaware, has lined the pockets of a small few who know how to profit off of it.

 _It's quite unfortunate, Anakin,_ an old man with bowed shoulders is saying in the twilight of his office, not sounding very sorry at all, _but I am powerless to do anything about it. This is, after all, a democracy. The people want the war won in totality—and so they shall have it, with you as their General._

 _Even if they run themselves into the ground? Chancellor, with all due respect, the infrastructure of the Republic—_

 _I know, my boy. Believe me, I know better than any other. It weighs heavily on my heart. But sacrifice is a necessity in wartime._

He didn't always agree with Palpatine, before the end. No matter what Obi-Wan thinks.

"With my life."

She squares her shoulders, lifts her chin. "Then return to Coruscant and wait for my signal. I'll try remotely disabling the chip first."

"How exactly—" Anakin frowns at her lifted brows. "I trust _you_ with my _life._ Maybe not so much your planning skills. Something as sensitive as the chip is going to be guarded from outside signals, if it isn't individual to each man. Are you planning to try it alone?"

"I've learned a few things since I left," she says, her face impassive. "I wouldn't try it if I didn't think I had a fair crack at actually doing it. The better option would be having a cover of legitimacy, with all of you—but time isn't on our side, not if the Republic is finally working to establish a peace referendum."

"I don't like this."

Ahsoka's mask begins to slip—he sees it in the clench of her jaw, the way her brows begin to furrow. Frustration bleeds through her cracks. "Anakin. Please."

They both know he doesn't have the authority to stop her any more. The hard knot in Anakin's chest doesn't soften, but it does shift. Just a little.

"Either way, we have to get moving," Rex cuts in, ignoring the sheepish glances he receives from both of them. "If it helps, sir, Comma—er, Tano has proven exceptionally capable of stealth since we began this endeavor. I trust her to keep herself safe."

"I just—at the _slightest_ hint of something going wrong, Ahsoka, abort the mission. Find me, contact me—whatever works for you. We'll go at it together."

Ahsoka nods, reluctantly, and he knows she's only ceding for the moment. "...I understand."

It's a start.

* * *

The return to Coruscant is just easy enough that it sets Anakin on edge. Although he tries to ignore the worst of it, the galaxy keens; years of turmoil, and there is now a low, rumbling sense of unease beneath the stillness of the Dark.

Before the Invisible Hand, chaos had roiled beneath the surface. It had always been far-off, though, some other conflict on some other horizon—at least, until you were in the middle of a war zone. Then the Force moved with blaster bolts, could be found embracing his fallen men, mingling with the smell of cauterized skin.

After...

Well. Anakin turns away from the tactical readouts that Tek has set to display over the streaks of hyperspace. "After" has been two years now, the hushed anticipation of a galaxy waiting for the other shoe to drop, the balance hanging on the most tenuous of tightropes.

He can barely stand it. It's like a broken bone just peeking out of the skin—everything about it is wrong, and yet somehow, it hasn't gone far enough.

What even is "far enough"? Anakin can't come up with the answer on his own, not with the low hum of sentient life scratching at his consciousness, so he takes to the hangar bay and finds a corner with droids that are in need of repair. If Artoo were here, he'd probably beep at him until Anakin gave in and listened to whatever he had to say.

"Where'd he go off to?" Anakin mutters, tinkering in the guts of a mouse cleaner droid. "Whatever. He'll turn up."

The motions he finds himself going through are as ancient as his bones. Mechanical knowhow had been his before the Jedi. His before the podrace, his before separation, his before he was too old to accompany his mother on hushed visits to the other slaves, watching as she tended to the sick and to the women in labor, bearing new life into the heart of a dead planet buried under the sands.

The anger, ever-present, eases when he does this. Obi-Wan had told him once, a baffled look on his face, that fixing things was one of the only times he ever saw Anakin draw calm from the Force—that for him, it was almost a form of meditation.

As always, Obi-Wan has an uncanny handle on him. (But always through a mirror, always from a certain point of view—)

Anakin frowns. "You're in rough shape, my friend," he tells the mouse droid's motherboard. It's an older model, if he had to guess. The circuitry is worn in places where the casing didn't do the best job of protecting it, and the wiring uses a kind of protective coating that they'd stopped using some years back. An upgrade isn't out of the question, what with the way these mouse droids are designed, and when he looks at the toolkit he keeps with him he realizes that if he wanted to, he could do it right here. "Let's see if we can't do something about that."

 _Fives was right._

His jaw sets. Fives had tried to assassinate Palpatine; he died in Rex's arms in a warehouse on Corsucant, defending to his dying breath his motives. He had been doing his duty. The nightmare was over.

 _Fives was right._

 _The Chancellor was a good man._

 _You're the only one who still believes that._

Ahsoka is right, too. He curses under his breath as he burns his flesh hand with a piece of soldering duranium and shoves his work aside, cradling his head in his hands.

Everyone around him, even Padmé, has, at some point, expressed a marked distrust of the man who was supposed to lead them all to victory. None of them understood—least of all Obi-Wan, who has frequently warned him about associating with politicians (less so, after he went public with his marriage), and specifically about Palpatine (not at all, after his passing). They came to blows over it, even, at times. But how could Anakin expect them to understand?

When you're a desert foundling, no matter who you become later in life, you don't just _stop_ being what you were. Tatooine did not end where the sanctuary of the Jedi Order began. It all bleeds together, Jedi and desert rat, slave child and commanding warrior, and somewhere in that messy between is Anakin Skywalker, who has always remembered where he came from.

In the Order, it seemed for most of his time as a Padawan that the expectation was forgetfulness—that you leave the heat in your bones and the wariness in the curve of your spine behind, that you cast aside trust in your senses, that the vital fire that keeps you moving under the suns is supposed to be quelled, quenched, left to ashes. Obi-Wan has never stopped reminding him to be patient, and sometimes he's even been right.

But.

He didn't _understand,_ then _._ He still doesn't.

Anakin feels his throat, tight as a vise, and knows he ought to relax. But he can't. He is not a stupid man, and war has forced him to think sharp and on his feet. He's been on the front lines since the _Invisible Hand,_ far away from the Chancellor, and the distance has forced him to realize what he never would have accepted as a Padawan or as a Master—or, even, accepted until he had his own children, even now lightyears away from him.

Maybe he should've realized, with every convenient twist of the knife, every little misstep, every "sadly necessary" political decision.

He would have to have been wiser for that.

Palpatine was not a good man, no. But he provided for Anakin a space that he had sorely needed as a boy. A space where he wasn't judged, either for what he had or for what he lacked.

Only now can he begin to admit to himself what he had known from somewhere near the beginning: there had always been strings attached.

Even if he hadn't known quite what those strings were.

"Damn it," he whispers, feeling the burning anger deep in his chest, feeling the turmoil and the long chains, more enduring than any restraint he's ever been under. " _Damn_ it!"

 _Ja'ak,_ the vast emptiness of space whispers back. _Ja'ak. In power I am set free._

Anakin surges to his feet and storms from the hangar bay. The only thing that helps in a time like this is motion, and they've got a bunch of droids in the training room that need scrapping.

* * *

Messages secured on a secret comm channel known only to a party of three, bouncing off unattended satellites somewhere deep in space:

 _00-33-54-32 GEN_

 _Angel, Obi-Wan, I'm coming home. For the first time in a long while._

 _00-33-54-32 GEN_

 _How are the twins? Wait, don't tell me. Leia's probably in your hair all the time, and Luke is being quiet and devious._

 _00-33-54-32 GEN_

 _I've been thinking about Ahsoka lately. How she left. Why she left._

 _I wish I had been able to carve out a space for her before it became necessary._

 _She deserved so much better._

 _00-33-54-32 GEN_

 _I know. I know. The Jedi Order is a choice and a path, and not everyone is going to stay. But we failed her. Not just personally, but institutionally. We've failed others, too._

 _Like my men. They're hard workers. They've sacrificed more than anything else._

 _But... you know._

 _00-33-54-32 GEN_

 _The war ends, and then what?_

* * *

He senses the difference in the planet just before the _Valiant_ breaks atmo, but before he can think much on it, two beacons of Light bloom in the Force and reach for him.

There is nothing quite like it in the universe.

"Whoa there, whoa," Anakin says, laughter escaping him. It earns him a few strange looks from the bridge crew, but that's alright. Stretching out to the beacons and taking hold is a matter of closing his eyes and breathing in, then breathing out—simple, as nothing else in his life is any more. Leia's consciousness is sharper than it had been since he had last connected to her this closely; she is a burning brand, searing and curious, and he welcomes her clumsy, questioning grasp with gladness. Luke's is softer, but no less curious, no less capable.

This.

This is what he has been fighting to protect.

 _Hello,_ he tells them, warm.

A burble of information appears in his mind: _Daddy,_ with an excited thrill; a flash of Padmé, dressed in her Senatorial getup; colored bantha-print blocks and what just might be the fuzzy scritch-scratch of Obi-Wan's beard against a soft cheek.

Leia pushes, and Anakin realizes that the images were Luke's. _You're back,_ she says, two years old and carefully enunciating her sentences.

 _You're talking,_ he sends back.

She emits a pulse of emotion across their nascent bond that might be indignant. _I'm good at talking!_

He wants to laugh, but he very carefully does not. This is a two-year-old he's talking to—and not just any two-year-old, but his two-year-old, who's clearly inherited Padmé's smarts and early adoption of communication. _I'll be home soon, Leia. Show me then, okay?_

 _Okay, Daddy._ Her signature thrums with barely-contained impatience. Luke seems to feel about the same; his grasp on the Force wiggles and bounces, like the younglings learning to pass feathers to each other, and Anakin gently detaches their minds from his and guides them back to their places.

"General?" Rex asks.

Anakin reins himself in. No need to have the bridge crew think he's a bantha leg short of a rocker. Or at least more short of a rocker than they already think he is. "Ever thought about children, Rex?"

"Er, not much, sir. We're not... made for that sort of thing." There's a hesitance to the words. Rex speaks them often, very conscious of his duty and position as a clone.

Technical readouts flash across his mind's eye. He remembers. The chip, purportedly designed to inhibit aggression—a ridiculous farce the more he thinks about it.

What does it really inhibit?

He imagines asking the cloners on Kamino about it, wonders what sort of discomfort or indignant reactions they would display in response to the question.

"That... wasn't exactly what I meant," he says, much more carefully when he spots the discomfort in his captain's expression. "I don't think it's impossible, though."

Rex shrugs. "Maybe after everything," he concedes.

He doesn't mean it—or, Anakin realizes, watching the way Rex's face flickers, he doesn't _want_ to mean it.

Fair enough, he supposes. It was mad of him and Padmé to fall in love; mad to stay in love; madder still to marry, and declare it to the public when it became clear that hiding twins was no option for any of them. Bringing children into a war-torn galaxy has only made the need to return it to order more important.

Add the complication of any clone's existence and their roles as soldiers to the mix, and he can see why even the thought of it would seem impossible.

* * *

Mace mostly only waits until Skywalker strides into the room to begin. They both have things to be doing, and he will admit, if only to himself, that the Force still roils in Anakin Skywalker's wake, still brings to mind those desperate years of the war when chaos was waking in the galaxy, and that he does not entirely like that.

It's a tad unsettling. That's all.

"Master Windu," Anakin says with an impatience he conceals just a bit more effectively than he did in his younger years.

"Knight Skywalker. Your report?"

Anakin nods. "My unit's deployment to Jakku yielded a sighting of Count Dooku, Master. Our investigation uncovered a secret facility in the Carbon Ridge, built for unknown purposes by unknown persons. Personally, this concerns me—"

"Me as well," Mace agrees, frowning as he considers it. While this meeting is mostly a formality, and the full Council will convene later to discuss Anakin's findings as they did Obi-Wan's, the debriefing is partially a space for Knights who have been out on extended missions to process whatever happened in the line of duty. Working with them, hearing their thoughts out, it's all part of the Jedi path.

"Especially since it seems like Count Dooku had prior knowledge of the facility."

Mace considers. "I see. That's troubling. What led you to that conclusion?"

"He had an intimate knowledge of the facility's layout, and he knew exactly where to find what he was looking for." Frustration boils behind Anakin's presence in the Force, but he is attempting to release it, attempting to let go, so Mace keeps quiet. For the moment. "When we encountered him, he had a holocron, Master. It was steeped in Dark energy. Whoever you send—be sure they can handle it."

"Don't worry about who the Council sends. Worry about decompressing—and your next assignment. Then release it to the Force." Anakin's face twists for a moment; Mace watches on coolly as he struggles to contain himself—but only just. To be at war is to exist in conflict. This, he thinks, is why he'd been against training the boy. "The presence of the Jedi is vital to ensuring the security of this peace conference. You'll be working with Master Tholme to oversee the process. I trust you're up to the task," he adds. "You're one of our most experienced with protracted security details. Be vigilant. The closest the galaxy got to this last time, sabotage sent it all up in flames. I don't want that happening again."

"Yes, Master," Anakin says, bowing at the waist.

Mace leans forward. "And... Knight Skywalker."

Anakin looks up.

"Your work has been invaluable. May the Force be with you as we begin this process."

Open shock radiates from the boy—and he is still a boy, hardened by war as he has become. Mace remembers being twenty-four and something. It isn't all it's cracked up to be. "And also with you," is the numb reply.

There's something sharp and suspicious behind those eyes. He has learned entirely too well the faults of the Order.

"Dismissed. Check in with the Healers and get some rest," Mace advises, keeping his expression even until Anakin exits the Council chamber.

With a deep exhale, he leans back in his seat and tries to release some tension into the Force, despite the vast, clouded web of sentients across Coruscant pressing in on him, smothering the clarity of the connection. The only thing he can think of as a comparison is that the Force on Coruscant is full of static—like a patchy comm call, like his last exchange with Master Yoda, who is currently somewhere deep in the jungles of Yavin IV and beginning the trek to his ship, like an outside influence is disturbing the ebb and flow of the currents.

Like a dam, situated somewhere far below the Cloudtop District.

If he was in the habit of confiding his worries to anyone other than Yoda in the process of catch-and-release that all Jedi must engage in, they would know that he has not truly trusted his own senses while on-planet in a long while. Not since Skywalker and Kenobi had pulled another impossible feat in landing the _Invisible Hand_ in any degree of intact.

Qui-Gon would have known what to say, damnably, because Mace never could quite stomach how free-spirited his friend was in life. Yoda trusts that his path will work itself out—and he trusts in Yoda's wisdom, but he also knows he was meant to step aside and follow the Force on a journey away from the Temple years ago, and that the war necessitated that he put his preparations for that aside and focus. With the passing of so many great Jedi, with the loss of the wisdom of those like Adi Gallia, Mace's role in the Order's infrastructure has become more and more vital.

Skywalker, and those like him, are at once too young to take on the responsibility they've been forced to have and too important to the war effort to be spared the grief. Thus also with Mace's place as chief strategist, organizer, and bureaucrat; only now, with the lull of aggressive conflict, has he been able to begin handing tasks off again. The Chancellor investigation to Obi-Wan, Jakku to Skywalker, Ord Mantell to Secura—

His datapad beeps.

"All is as the Force wills it," he reminds himself under his breath, reaching for it and turning it on. When he sees the contents of the notification, he frowns even more deeply than he had been before. The Galactic Enquirer has, unfortunately, made its presence known for the first time this standard day.

 _GALACTIC SPECIAL! ROGUE ONE POSTS AGAIN!_

 _Another act in the saga has made itself known to the galaxy as the mysterious starrunner Rogue One has once again spoken out on matters relating to the Chancellor's death, utilizing the Intergalactic Banking Clan's HoloNet subsidies to broadcast their expose article to every tuned-in comm in the galaxy. This time, the starrunner found details related to Banking Clan transactions with the Chancellor..._

He switches his datapad off, feeling a headache building behind his temples. "Was now the best time for this nonsense?"

Not for the first time, Mace wonders what sort of madman would freely distribute sensitive intelligence to the galaxy. While nothing close to the Jedi investigation has ever made it into Rogue One's reports, it's clear enough that whoever they are, they're very talented. Not only are they doing their own research, they're doing it very carefully and very thoroughly—and, judging by their choosing a different, pointed platform each time to release the information, they have a wicked sense of humor.

Meditation on the matter has revealed little. Whatever the Force is doing cannot be discerned through shatterpoints, at least not in this matter.

 _Trust in the Force, we must,_ Yoda had told him during their most recent communication. _For good or for ill, not for us to decide, it is. Holding fast to control—dangerous! Too dangerous to think of. Learned much during this trip, I have. Share with you upon my return, I shall._

While Yavin IV, by virtue of its secluded nature, is far enough from comm networks that the communique had been by necessity voice-only, something in Yoda's voice had been different.

Hopeful.

Perhaps for the first time since the Clone Wars began, the Grand Master of the Jedi Order had sounded like he used to in the days when Mace himself was a Padawan with perennially bruised shins.

The currents of the Force are still veiled. But Mace can't help the thought that springs to mind, a coalescing of all that he thinks of and observes in the galaxy:

 _Something big is on the horizon. We just can't see it yet._

* * *

 **I have an absolute monster of a sequence upcoming. Stay tuned: this is one of three or possibly even four parts.**


	22. Chapter 21

It's Obi-Wan who senses him at the foot of the building before anyone else.

 _Anakin,_ his Master's voice says, warm—but he knows Obi-Wan, if nothing else, and he can hear a hint of distraction in his tone. _Glad to have you back. Get up here already—I can only keep Leia from trying to pull my beard out for so long._

Anakin smirks and makes no secret of just how much the thought amuses him. _I can't make the lift come down any faster, Obi-Wan._

Obi-Wan's response is a peeved image of Anakin's daughter pulling on his hair, not unlike whenever he banished Anakin to creche duty as a Padawan.

As the maglift dings, Anakin Skywalker snickers like the desert child he once was.

 _This is so much better than scaling the building in the dead of night... every night._

 _Pardon?_

The lift _dings_. A lone elderly Rodian exits with haste, speaking in a low voice to her comm.

 _Well—_

 _Never mind. I'm not at all surprised._

It seems like an eternity goes by before the lift makes it to the five hundredth floor, but he makes it there. Striding out feels weighty even as he does it. He knows the way to his wife's apartments better than he knows himself. If, having been away so long, some trepidation lives deep within him, the sight of his destination (and the sense of the presences beyond it) wipe away all other thoughts.

Padmé's door slides open for him without any fuss. Anakin steps in, the door slides shut, and—

—two little bodies slam into him with all the force they can muster. Anakin laughs, gathering his children into his arms and pressing them close to him. Leia is Padmé's spitting image, even moreso than the last time she'd snuck into Padmé's room while they were on call. Luke has his eyes, his face.

They're beautiful. Each of them.

Footsteps sound from the kitchen. It takes him a moment to track with the noise, lost as he is in rediscovering the feel and sense of his children; when he does look up, a vision of radiance stands in the doorway with tears in her eyes. Behind her, two familiar faces peer into the living room.

"Angel?" Anakin asks, dumbly, alarmed by her tears. "What's wrong?"

"Mama, it's okay," Luke says, peering at her with concern.

Padmé sucks in a breath and brushes her tears aside. "Welcome home," she says, and Anakin feels his heart thump. Bright fire, a burning brand, all courage and sparks—everything she is has remained undimmed, and in his ever-so-slightly biased opinion, has grown even stronger. His brilliant wife. His angel.

But these are the things he's never known how to put into words, at least not while others are watching. So instead: "It's good to be home," he tells her, and watches her smile bloom with something close to awe.

He'll never get used to it. All the long years, all the terrors of war, the things he has done—and this is what he gets to do now. Now and for the rest of their lives.

He has a family to come home to.

This is worth every sacrifice.

"They've been waiting," Padmé says, gesturing to Luke and Leia.

Leia nods, uncaring of how her chin knocks against Anakin's collarbone. "We picked out new clothes for you," she informs him, imperious, and with some bewilderment, he catches Padmé's eye.

His wife shrugs, her smile growing wry. "Leia insisted."

"Well, thank you, Princess," Anakin says, giving Leia a smile. She puffs up, preening, and he tamps down on a laugh. "How about you show me a little later? We have guests, and it's only polite to say hi."

Padmé steps aside. Obi-Wan and Satine both have strange expressions on their faces—subtle enough that they probably don't notice the identical arch of the brows, the creases around their eyes that look curiously like grief.

"See," Obi-Wan says, a note of his customary restrained triumph lurking in his tone, "Luke _does_ have his nose."

"Master Kenobi, when did I ever say he didn't?" Satine is as gracious as ever. But there's an edge to the exchange; Anakin can't think of anything he cares for less in the moment.

Luke giggles when Anakin sets Leia on his lap and lifts his boy into the air. "Seems to me like Luke and Leia are two of a kind, Obi-Wan. I think I can only claim the hair."

Obi-Wan meets his eyes, and Anakin sees the boy he was filtering across his mind's eye. The only thing he was more inept at than keeping track of his lightsaber was his hair, and they had several spare combs to show for it.

Then Obi-Wan opens his mouth. "Then you'll be happy to know that they both enjoy the challenge of even the most tangled locks, my friend."

"I'm good at hair," Leia says, turning to Anakin, and—oh.

 _Oh,_ he thinks, thinks of the first time he had seen them after they were born. It hadn't been too long after, really, but it felt like something out of a dream—holding his children, cradling them in his arms. The night on Naboo had been black as pitch. Varykino straddles the line between the hemispheres of the planet, and it had been during the Season of Darkness, just before the Festival of Light. Even with the soft synthpanels glowing in the seams of the most modern addition to Padmé's family retreat, he hadn't been able to see the true color of their eyes, and he hadn't been able to bear the thought of waking her after so long spent attending to them alone.

Now, on Coruscant, the light of the early afternoon hitting Padmé's wide-windowed living room, he can see what darkness had concealed from him before.

Leia has Padmé's eyes. Deep brown, the kind that blossoms into a warm amber when hit by the direct light of any kind of sun.

"Why don't we sit down in a better position?" Anakin asks, feeling keenly an almost painful wonder at the newness of this time, however brief it might be. "You can play with my hair all you like then, Princess."

He had been able to keep up his connection with his children through the Force, even being systems away, reaching beyond time, beyond space, to touch and to guard their growing minds—but none of that could have prepared him for the fierce joy of truly knowing them, holding them close to him. He's almost loathe to let go, but Leia is a squirmer, and Luke is only barely more restrained.

His mother had also had dark brown eyes.

The thought strikes him like a blaster bolt and blooms in his heart, a starburst of half-forgotten childhood. Even as Padmé leans on him when they dutifully sit against her couches instead of on them, as Obi-Wan and Satine keep the conversation going as they catch up and Anakin finds himself learning about the intricacies of Mandalorian policy, as little hands card through his too-long mop of hair and make careful twists and loops of his locks, he can't shake the memory of his mother's eyes in the desert evening, patient and hopeful even as she faded and passed into the sands like so many of them on Tatooine, children of the sun living under the watchful gaze of gods that only the forgotten know.

Shmi Skywalker is dead. He will mourn her for the rest of his natural life and beyond.

But her memory is far from forgotten.

Anakin thinks of the vision of Varykino, the building storm, the young man robed in black like Revan stepped out of legends. He thinks of Ben, sour and morose, a boy with not-quite-black hair and dark, familiar eyes.

Padmé's hand finds his, and her calluses scrape against his own. She laces their fingers together and squeezes.

Worry and stress have put lines around her mouth. Just like what has happened to him.

So much they share between them. Children now, too, proof of their once-secret love.

"—Never mind that business on Cato Nemoidia," Obi-Wan is saying with haste, as always more animated around Satine than anyone else in the galaxy. Her eyes are narrowed in triumph. It's not every day someone gets one over on the Negotiator.

Unless your name is Satine Kryze, apparently, in which case it's not only a daily occurrence, but an hourly one.

"We'll discuss it later," she decides, and Padmé's face goes suspiciously smooth. "I want to hear about the most recent business. Naboo, was it?"

"If you can talk about it, I'd be interested as well," Padmé tells Obi-Wan, who makes a face that could be a cross between apprehension and exasperation. Depends on the day. And, usually, whether Anakin's done something he disapproves of or not, but he hasn't even been _around_ to do things Obi-Wan would disapprove of, so that's right out.

 _You went to Naboo?_ Anakin asks.

Obi-Wan floats something like annoyance back in his direction. _Yes._ "Perhaps later. It is almost time for the children to take their nap."

"Not yet!" Luke exclaims in alarm, looking up from Padmé's hair with a suddenness—and an unintentional yanking of the braid he was working on—that has her carefully concealing a wince.

She reaches back and tousles his hair, turning to give him a firm glance. "With all the excitement today, I think it's more important than ever that you two get your proper rest. You'll need all the energy you can get to show your father everything he's been waiting for so long to see, don't you think?"

There are a great many complaints after that, some weeping, some gnashing of teeth, and Anakin learns quickly the difficulty of denying two unruly two-year-olds their dearest desires.

"3PO's really got his work cut out for him, huh?" he mutters to Padmé under his breath.

Padmé sighs. "I sent him to get an oil bath today. I felt bad."

"You're doing incredible."

"Don't make fun of me," she says, a smile touching at her lips.

He catches her hand. "I'd be far too afraid to make fun of a senator."

"Oh, Anakin." Somewhere deep within the Force, the current that is Padmé Naberrie Amidala-Skywalker murmurs, swirls, hums with a remembered day by the lake, so many lifetimes ago. She looks at him with something indescribably warm that makes his soul quaver. "All this time, and you remember that?"

"Always," he says, and it's the only promise he's been confident in keeping in a long, long time.

* * *

"Right. Naboo." Obi-Wan leans back in his chair and folds one arm over his chest, his other hand stroking his beard. "I'm sure all three of you are aware that I was assigned to investigate the Chancellor's death, and furthermore that a Senior Padawan was assigned to me under special circumstances."

"Lana, wasn't it? Lana Viszka Ruhr?" Padmé asks. Obi-Wan cuts her a surprised look. "I remember you had her come here for the briefing."

Anakin tenses. "You _what?"_

"Anakin," Obi-Wan starts—

"Bright girl." Padmé stares _hard._ First at Anakin, then at Obi-Wan. Her smile could cut duranium cleanly in half. "Sabé told me that she coaxed Leia down from the fridge in record time."

Obi-Wan nods, slowly, and in the bond Anakin senses that same irritating certainty Obi-Wan tends to have when it comes to things like this—the certainty that he did the right thing. Parts of them belong to each other, but he will never quite get over how that _particular_ portion of Obi-Wan is so resolute, so unceasing. So _annoying._ "That she did."

"Viszka?" Satine's voice is sharp. Sharper than she intends, judging by the way she draws back from where she had been perched on the edge of Padmé's plushest settee, forcibly relaxing her posture. She looks between them all as neutrally as she can muster. "I wasn't aware that one of the lesser Houses had children in the Order."

"It's what's on her record, at any rate," Obi-Wan says, and the others probably miss it, but Anakin sees the way his fingers twitch in his beard and the creases around his eyes tighten for the smallest of moments. "Hard to tell if it's legitimate. She was found on Concord Dawn during your Reformation—but she was six standard years. By all accounts, she recalls little of the experience."

"Six? Isn't that a little old?"

Anakin doesn't realize it's come out of his mouth until it has, and Obi-Wan's furrowing his brows at him in a _why-are-you-asking_ kind of way. _Anakin?_

 _I was nine,_ Anakin says, a little helplessly, a little angrily.

And Obi-Wan doesn't know what to do with that. He can sense it. _Anakin._

 _Don't Anakin me, Obi-Wan—_

"Yes, from what I understand the standard age within the Order is _young._ Far too young," Satine muses.

Obi-Wan lifts one shoulder in an approximation of a shrug. "The younger the sentient, the easier it is to immerse them in a Force-based environment—but I digress. Lana was assigned to me for several reasons. The primary reason is a curious condition she is afflicted by—uncontrollable visions. Ever since her Master passed early on in the war, they have come upon her without warning; Master Yoda believes they are related to the matter of the Chancellor's death, judging by their contents."

"Are they?" Anakin isn't one to discard visions. Not even Yoda telling him that going to his mother might have led to her death changed his thoughts on the matter.

 _A man may see many things under the suns, but the man who discards his insights will find himself on a tall dune when the sands gather._ That's how he thinks the proverb went, anyways.

"I have reason to believe they are. Quite a few of her insights enabled us to make progress on our investigation. Without them, we would have wasted precious time—which is why we ended up going to Naboo. Of course, our mission to act as diplomats was legitimate, and we fulfilled our duties in that regard—"

"Glad to hear it."

Obi-Wan pauses, his lips pursed, and gives his former Padawan a pointed look. "Would you like to hear this tale, Anakin?"

"Go ahead, go ahead." Anakin waves a hand, then folds it behind his arm. All's fair when one's former Master is a pedant.

 _I can_ hear _you._

 _Keep on hearing! You know it's true._

"As I was saying, our duty partially involved engaging in strategic diplomacy directly in the heart of the trouble: the northern mountains, where our old friend Darth Maul resurfaced with a small cabal of dissidents. Force knows what exactly he was hoping to accomplish."

"The north? That's curious." Padmé and Satine exchange glances. "It could be the same group from the northern courts that tried protesting against trade with the Gungans. They call themselves the Outrowers. They've vied for their vision of Naboo for years—even tried to talk of moving the capital to Tharband, their home city. Since the war began, there are some among them that have visibly leaned Separatist."

"I'm inclined to agree. Lana uncovered something that throws a spanner into that theory, though. There was an attempt on the Queen that she and a royal guard thwarted... a man in a mechanic's uniform, with a strange patch sown onto it. A circle facing inwards, ringed with many tines."

She frowns. "Then either some kind of misdirection or something deeper is going on. The symbol of the Outrowers is a teardrop. Simple, elegant, and to the point."

"It all sounds rather familiar to me." Satine leans forward, her hands on her knees, her eyes shadowed with the remembrance of times past. "Darth Maul, a dissident group, shadowy happenings in the background. Let's hope it doesn't blow up before the peace conference."

Exhaustion and a tiny pang of something Obi-Wan will pretend doesn't exist within him murmur in the Force, spearheads of the overall burnout they're all feeling making itself known to Anakin, who feels every current in this room like it is his own.

"I certainly hope not," Obi-Wan says.

Anakin tilts his head. "What does that have to do with this Lana's visions, though?"

"Simply put, while on our way out, and then after, when we returned to Theed, knowledge she gained from the visions alerted us to several data terminals containing valuable evidence on the Chancellor's activities and hobbies, which may have lead to his death." He's cool and smooth as he says it, his face blank and befitting of a Jedi, and something about that nudges at Anakin's senses.

"Data terminals," he repeats. "Interesting."

"Why is that, Knight Skywalker?" Satine's gaze is sharp, but not intentionally cutting, not in this circumstance.

He thinks.

Hopefully.

Satine is a woman whose good side you really, _really_ want to stay on.

"I ran into one that was _very_ interesting on the mission I just returned from, Duchess Kryze. Unlike anything I've seen before. I guess I'm wondering if any of the terminals Obi-Wan ran into happened to be... blocky? Hexagonal? More viewports than anyone needs, that kind of thing?"

Obi-Wan shakes his head. "I'm afraid they all looked like your run-of-the-mill terminals, my very young friend. Though Lana did extract the information we needed from them in record time."

"What, you didn't do the slicing yourself?"

"No. She's a dab hand at it, and it seems she picked up some rather useful tricks from Master Tholme. Somehow." If anyone could ever convey the dryness of the desert within the space of a single word like it was nothing, it always was going to be Obi-Wan, master of a thousand phrases.

"Interesting," Anakin muses, lending no words to the thoughts half-formed in the back of his mind.

"All around, she sounds very resourceful." Padmé pauses. "If a bit of a handful."

Obi-Wan snorts. "Oh, it's nothing I'm not already used to."

"You must be talking about the younglings you mentor," Anakin cuts in with a false brightness, for the moment not totally inclined to lend his thoughts his attention. Now is for Padmé, the curl of her lips and the toughness of her fingers; for Obi-Wan, who looks positively bothered, and even for the Duchess, who keeps shooting discreet looks at his astonishingly _smooth_ and _collected_ former Master.

A lonely Senior Padawan with a dead Master and a dab hand in the technological, whose visions serve up secrets that no living being knows, can wait until later.

* * *

As it turns out, "later" ends up being the following day in the Temple, waiting outside the Archives for Master Tholme, whose timetable is never certain—a fact he'd forgotten until about now, thirty standard minutes into watching his fellow Jedi come and go with varying degrees of tension in their bodies, whether displayed through lekku, other tendrils, hunched shoulders, back feathers, or what-have-you.

Peace is a complicated process, it seems. Especially when it reigned for so long in the Core and took so little to be forgotten. That a thousand generations passed before another galaxy-wide war split the Force itself in two is sometimes boggling to consider.

After all he's seen, time itself still escapes his grasp.

"Oh—pardon me!" comes a voice, and Anakin automatically steps aside as a small, robed figure steps around him. It only takes a moment for his brain to register _blonde hair_ and a further moment to see the exact shade of platinum blonde and think, _what—Duchess?_ before he takes a second look and spots the long Padawan braid dangling from her messy curls.

Without thinking, his hand flashes out to catch her arm. Lana Viszka Ruhr jolts, then turns to face him with wide eyes the color of the sea.

"Say, I think I know you," he says, ignoring the pointed glance she gives his hand, curled all the way around her arm. "Lana Viszka Ruhr, wasn't it?"

"I suppose you might know of me by now," she hedges. There's wariness in her, in the way she regards him, in the look in her eyes. Anakin probes her presence and feels a strange amalgamation of outer shields, weak and easily parsed, hiding something stronger beneath them. The battle shields, he realizes, the old ones, used by the Shadows in times of peace.

 _Interesting._

"I guess you would know Obi-Wan a bit by now, huh. Yeah, he told me about you. Said you're a decent slicer."

Lana shrugs as well as she can with him restricting some of her movement. They're starting to garner glances from passerby, so he lets go; she tucks her arms into her robes and draws her chin up. "You could say that. I know enough to spruce up the Archive's security codes, that's all."

"And is that what you were doing just now?"

"Yes," she says, giving him a mildly disbelieving look. "Master Nu requested it of me. You can ask yourself if you would like, Knight Skywalker."

"I could, but I think I'd rather ask Master Tholme to look over your handiwork," Anakin decides. It's spur of the moment, really, as Tholme melts out of the shadows and makes his way toward them from the far corridor on the left, but watching the slight widening of her eyes—the way something like apprehension enters them—lends some credence to his reasons for doing so.

Lana tucks a small, ugly-looking datapad into her belt and bows lightly. "As you wish, Knight Skywalker. I'm sure he'll find that I've learned well what he had to teach."

"Confident in yourself, aren't you?"

"That which is given to me is apportioned only by the Force," she returns.

He hums. "I guess we'll see what it's done for you, then."

* * *

"Padawan Ruhr."

"Master Tholme." Lana waits at the edge of the security room in the Archives, outwardly poised, but her presence is on edge and tense. As the minutes tick by, Anakin's starting to think that the girl resembles a cornered tooka more than she does a prospective Jedi Knight. There's something unsettled and strange lingering in her, in the way she struggles to maintain an even expression.

If any of the Jedi were going to recognize it, he supposes, it would be him.

"Come here," Tholme says, waiting until she does, her body angled to cut Anakin out of the proceedings, to continue. He gestures to the terminal's readout with a gloved hand. "You've done a fair job for a Temple-bound Padawan, but there's something you couldn't see while taking this task on."

She tilts her head. Her hand curls around her overlong braid. "I understand, Master. What have I failed to notice?"

"Still eager to learn, I see. Look here, at the link you've made between the lower left wing's sensors and their counterparts on the right. While you were able to account for the most common methods of slicing into these, you don't have the clearance to access the sensors set to the entrances. There's a gap in your protocols regarding those." He leans back, his scar gleaming a pale silver in the blue light from the readout. "Otherwise, you've certainly accomplished the goals Master Nu set for you. You are dismissed to your next task—I hear you have quite a few. Creche duty next, was it?"

"Yes, that is next on the list. My... my thanks, Master. May the Force be with you." She bows and makes a rapid exit. It's too late to conceal the high color that rises in her cheeks, but an effort is an effort.

With Lana gone, Tholme turns to Anakin. His gaze is piercing. "Knight Skywalker. Conduct your personal investigations on your own time, and perhaps consider leaving them until after this conference is past us. Division among our numbers at a time as crucial as this is of no use to any of us, much less the innocents depending upon us to bring an end to the war."

 _Innocents, right. Innocents we've kept hanging for years as no one wins and too many people die,_ Anakin wants to spit, nearly does it, but swallows the words down. He's got just enough sense to recognize that no matter how much he dislikes it, in this instance, Tholme is right.

But he can't shake the feeling that's settled deep in his spine, the same Force-laden certainty he gets when infiltrating Separatist bases and things are about to go terribly wrong. The more he thinks on it, thinks of the look in her eyes and the way Obi-Wan picked his words very carefully, thinks of the allotment of traditionally punitive tasks she has been assigned in the wake of Obi-Wan's mission, the more he trusts his misgivings.

Lana Viszka Ruhr, he is certain, is a fracture in the Force. She's a faultline waiting to be torn open with the next shift in the fabric of the galaxy. And if the Jedi Order can't see that, if they can't do a damn thing about it when the truth has been staring them in the face for years...

Well. Anakin Skywalker is no stranger to doing what is both difficult in the moment and right in the long term.

...But it will be to his benefit to gather some evidence first. Which will mean checking in with Obi-Wan after he finishes up arranging security details with Tholme.

* * *

 **If you're still reading this: thank you for sticking with me! We're coming up on the end of the first act, and I'm having fun with it. :) The tightest romp this is not, but the journey has been valuable-seeing it through will hopefully be just as fun!**


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